Constraint Definition Rule to Achieve High Rate of Success in Negotiations.
Raiye Alemayehu, Takayuki Itō · 2012
Humans when evaluating possible options, often reduce the possibilities that have to be evaluated at each step by eliminating those that did not satisfy the previous criteria. We will show that when agents use this approach their utility space becomes less complex. As result, a negotiation mechanism can support more number of agents. Moreover we will show that negotiations between agents that use this approach have more chance of locating a deal. We call this approach the subset rule. Specically we consider modeling negotiations where many agents have to agree upon one option among available many. We assume that the negotiation matter is described by multiple interdependent issues. Each issue can have multiple possible values. The issues are interdependent means that it is not possible simplify the negotiation by negotiating over one issue at a time. When this is the case, the contract space is usually large and we face two challenges. The rst is the diculty of evaluating each possible contract. The second is the computational complexity of searching for the optimal contract. We will show that enforcing the sub- set rule when eliciting preference from human users helps us to tackle these two challenges. We use a bidding based negotiation mechanism and constraint based utility space model of previous work.