Bazaar - Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

Negotiation has been extensively discussed in game-theoretic, economic, and management science literatures for decades. Recent growing interest in autonomous interacting software agents and their potential application in areas such as electronic commerce has given increased importance to automated negotiation.

Evidence from both theoretical analysis and observations of human interactions suggests that if decision makers can somehow take into consideration what other agents are thinking and furthermore learn during their interactions how other agents behave, their payoff might increase.

We have proposed Bazaar, a sequential decision making model of negotiation. It provides an adaptive, multi-issue negotiation model capable of exhibiting a rich set of negotiation behaviors. Within the proposed negotiation framework, we model learning as a Bayesian belief update process. We present both theoretical analysis and initial experimental results showing that learning is beneficial in the sequential negotiation model.

current head

past staff

  • Michael Rectenwald
  • Maksim Tsvetovat
  • Dajun Zeng

past contact

  • Michael Rectenwald