Coalitions in Agricultural Supply Chains: A Behavioral Approach in Multi-party Automated Contract Negotiation
Anderson P. Avila-Santos, Daniel S. Kaster, Evandro Baccarin · 2017
Coalition formation builds a team of agents aiming at a certain goal or increasing their performance. Coalition formation on agricultural supply chains may allow a few chain's members to take advantage of some common feature (e.g., a shared resource) to better position themselves, for instance, performing better negotiations. SPICA Framework provides means for automated negotiation of multi-party contracts within an agricultural supply chain. SPICA negotiation protocol was enhanced to allow the coalition of negotiators. This paper introduces a few behavioral traits, namely, aggressiveness and fairness, to model the behavior of negotiators efficiently in a coalition and assesses how they impact the negotiation outcome. We survey the scenarios for building coalitions in supply chains and propose a way to model the behavior of coalitions based on a characterization of the risks inherent to them. The model is realized within an existing framework for the negotiation of multi-party contracts. We also present a running example in which a few negotiators can share a common resource and, in doing so, they become more competitive and more successful in signing a multi-party contract. The results show that the proposed model is able to reproduce expected outcomes of distinct behavior traits.