A Negotiator's Backup Plan: Optimal Concessions with a Reservation Value
<|reference_start|>A Negotiator's Backup Plan: Optimal Concessions with a Reservation Value: Automated negotiation is a well-known mechanism for autonomous agents to reach agreements. To realize beneficial agreements quickly, it is key to employ a good bidding strategy. When a negotiating agent has a good back-up plan, i.e., a high reservation value, failing to reach an agreement is not necessarily disadvantageous. Thus, the agent can adopt a risk-seeking strategy, aiming for outcomes with a higher utilities.   Accordingly, this paper develops an optimal bidding strategy called MIA-RVelous for bilateral negotiations with private reservation values. The proposed greedy algorithm finds the optimal bid sequence given the agent's beliefs about the opponent in $O(n^2D)$ time, with $D$ the maximum number of rounds and $n$ the number of outcomes. The results obtained here can pave the way to realizing effective concurrent negotiations, given that concurrent negotiations can serve as a (probabilistic) backup plan.<|reference_end|>
@article{florijn2024a,
    title={A Negotiator's Backup Plan: Optimal Concessions with a Reservation Value},
    author={Tamara C.P. Florijn, Pinar Yolum, Tim Baarslag},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.19361},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.19361},
    primaryClass={cs.GT cs.AI}
}