Decision making of negotiation agents using markov chains

In dynamic and complex negotiation environments, a negotiation agent can participate or quit negotiation at any time and can potentially reach an agreement with more than one trading partner as the result of the existence of dynamic outside options. Thus, it's important for a negotiation agent to make a decision on when to complete negotiation given its trading partners' current proposals and market dynamics. Rather than explicitly modeling all the trading partners, this paper presents a novel decision making strategy based on a tractable Markov chain model of negotiation process. An agent can use this model to determine whether to accept the best proposal of its trading partners or let negotiation proceed forward during each round of negotiation. Experimental results suggest that the proposed strategy achieved more favorable negotiation outcomes as compared with the general strategy.