A Solution for Bilateral Negotiations in the Navy Detailing Process

Abstract

We provide an integrative solution for negotiations in the Navy detailing process considering the uncertain and dynamic outside options. The outside options influence the negotiation strategies via the impact on the reservation prices. The solution is composed of three modular models: single-threaded negotiations, synchronized multi-threaded negotiations, and dynamic multi-threaded negotiations. The single-threaded negotiation model provides the negotiation strategy given the reservation price. The other two models calculate the reservation price of a negotiation thread based on the model of the outside options by viewing all outside options as a multi-threaded negotiation process. The model of synchronized multi-threaded negotiations considers the presence of concurrently available outside options and provides an approach to estimate the outcome when the threads are known. The model of dynamic multi-threaded negotiations expands the synchronized model by considering the uncertain outside options that may come dynamically in the future. We propose two effective negotiation strategies, the time-dependent strategy and Bayesian learning strategy, from the AI field. Four heuristic approaches are designed to estimate the expected utility from a synchronized multi-threaded negotiation. A Poisson process is used to model the random sequential arrivals, and formulas are provided to calculate the expected utility from a negotiation process when uncertain outside options may come in the future. We give preliminary experimental analysis to characterize the impact of outside options on the reservation price and so on the negotiation strategy. The results show that the utility of a negotiator improves significantly when she considers outside options from when she does not, and the average utility is higher when she both considers the concurrent outside options and foresee the future ones than when she only considers the concurrent outside options.