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Israel Sofer

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JAAMAS Journal 2015 Journal Article

Negotiation in exploration-based environment

Israel Sofer
David Sarne
Avinatan Hassidim

Abstract When two parties need to split some reward between them, negotiation theory can predict what offers the parties will make and how the reward will be split. When a single party needs to evaluate several alternatives and choose the best among them, optimal-stopping-rule theories guide it as to how to perform the exploration, what to explore next and when to stop. We consider a model in which party A needs to choose one alternative, but has no information and no means of acquiring information on the value of each alternative. Party B, on the other hand, has no interest in what party A chooses, but can perform (costly) exploration to learn about the different alternatives. As both negotiation and exploration take time, the common deadline and discounting factor further tie the processes together. We study the combined model, providing a comprehensive game theoretic based analysis, enabling the extraction of the payments that need to be made between agents A and B, and the social welfare. Special emphasis is placed on studying the effect of interleaving negotiation and exploration, and when is this method preferred over separating the two. In addition to exploring the basic questions, we also consider the case in which one of the parties has some control over the parameters of the problem (e. g. the negotiation protocol), and show how it increases the utility of this party but decreases the overall welfare.

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AAAI Conference 2012 Conference Paper

Negotiation in Exploration-Based Environment

Israel Sofer
David Sarne
Avinatan Hassidim

This paper studies repetitive negotiation over the execution of an exploration process between two selfinterested, fully rational agents in a full information environment with side payments. A key aspect of the protocol is that the exploration’s execution may interleave with the negotiation itself, inflicting some degradation on the exploration’s flexibility. The advantage of this form of negotiation is in enabling the agents supervising that the exploration’s execution takes place in its agreed form as negotiated. We show that in many cases, much of the computational complexity of the new protocol can be eliminated by solving an alternative negotiation scheme according to which the parties first negotiate the exploration terms as a whole and then execute it. As demonstrated in the paper, the solution characteristics of the new protocol are somehow different from those of legacy negotiation protocols where the execution of the agreement reached through the negotiation is completely separated from the negotiation process. Furthermore, if the agents are given the option to control some of the negotiation protocol parameters, the resulting exploration may be suboptimal. In particular we show that the increase in an agent’s expected utility in such cases is unbounded and so is the resulting decrease in the social welfare. Surprisingly, we show that further increasing one of the agents’ level of control in some of the negotiation parameters enables bounding the resulting decrease in the social welfare.

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