Automated Negotiation Agents for Modeling Single-Peaked Bidders: An Experimental Comparison

Abstract

During automated negotiations, intelligent software agents act based on the preferences of their proprietors, interdicting direct preference exposure. The agent can be armed with a component of an opponent’s modeling features to reduce the uncertainty in the negotiation, but how negotiating agents with a single-peaked preference direct our attention has not been considered. Here, we first investigate the proper representation of single-peaked preferences and implementation of single-peaked agents within bidder agents using different instances of general single-peaked functions. We evaluate the modeling of single-peaked preferences and bidders in automated negotiating agents. Through experiments, we reveal that most of the opponent models can model our benchmark single-peaked agents with similar efficiencies. However, the accuracies differ among the models and in different rival batches. The perceptron-based P1 model obtained the highest accuracy, and the frequency-based model Randomdance outperformed the other competitors in most other performance measures.

Keywords

• automated negotiation
• single-peaked preferences
• preference estimation
• benchmark bidding agents