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(n2D) 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.

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Coordinating Multi-deal Bilateral Negotiations
23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2024
Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam (CWI), The Netherlands

Florijn, T., Yolum, P., & Baarslag, T. (2024). A negotiator's backup plan: Optimal concessions with a reservation value. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (pp. 2264–2266).