The concealing conceder: Minimizing the information revealed by concessions in automated negotiation

A negotiating party may want to conceal their preferences to avoid exploitation by the opponent. To achieve this goal, a possible strategy is to limit the amount of information that is revealed by the offers proposed in a negotiation. In this paper, we define which and how much information is disclosed by offers and we present two methods to conceal preferences from the opponent. We show a method that, given the number of offers, gives a sequence of offers that minimizes the increase in revealed information. Additionally, we present a method that, given specific information that may be revealed, gives a sequence of offers that reveals only such information, and we prove guarantees on the length of this sequence. Our experiments show that both methods outperform baseline strategies based on random sampling, and that the methods even match optimal sequences in terms of revealed information.

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