Strategy Acquisition of Agents
in Multi-Issue Negotiation
As the Internet spreads throughout the world, the use of e-commerce is growing.In e-commerce, we need transaction system using the net work and technologies for effectively supporting users.Especially, a negotiation support is required for decreasing the difference of users' negotiating skills. For example, negotiation agents can reduce the users' load by negotiating automatically instead of users. The negotiation agents should have good strategies to respond to various opponents. So far, two types of negotiation have been reserched. The first type is single-issue negotiation which deal with only a price. In this type of negotiation, sellers and buyers present bidding prices alternately to lead to an agreement. However, in an actual negotiation, we should consider multiple issues such as the number of items, delivery date, and services in addition to a price. These issues cannot be dealt with in single-issue negotiation. The second tyoe is multi-issue negotiation that considers multiple issues in addition to a price. In this type of negotiation, as the number of issues increases, the negotiation becomes more complex and leading a good agreement, negotiation strategies for agents are important in multi-issue negotiation. In the previous researchs, the strategies for multi-issue negotiation are simple methods that bring own proposal close to opponent's proposal. However, in multi-issue negotiation, it is required to reflect each other's preferences for increasing mutual benefits. This strategy is called win-win strategy. In order to realize win-win negotiation strategy, we should consider two points. The first point is to take account of each other's preferences. Considering each other's preference enables to increase mutual benefits. The second point is a concession strategy to opponents. The difference of each other's concession strategy causes imbalance of their benefits. For example, when an agent makes concession largely and an opponent makes little concession at the beginnging of the negotiation, the agent might make a loss. The solution of this problem is that the agents acquire the concession strategy that can respond to various opponents.
