Generalized Bargaining Protocols

Automated Negotiation (AN) is a research field with roots extending back to the mid-twentieth century. There are two dominant AN research directions in recent years: (1) designing new heuristic strategies for the simplest bargaining protocol called the Alternating Offers Protocol (AOP) and (2) defining new mediated protocol that require a trusted third party. Intelligence lies in the strategy in the first direction and the protocol in the latter. This paper argues for a third way that aims at designing unmediated AN protocols with desired properties. We introduce a generalization of AOP to a wide class of unmediated protocols that keep its main advantages while providing the designer with the freedom to design protocols with desired properties. We also introduce the first fruits of this research direction in the form of an unmediated protocol and a corresponding simple strategy that can be shown theoretically to be exactly rational, optimal, and complete for bilateral negotiations with no information about partner's preferences.