Abstract We present a novel negotiation model that allows an agent to learn how to negotiate during concurrent bilateral negotiations in unknown and dynamic e-markets. The agent uses an actor-critic architecture with model-free reinforcement learning to learn a strategy expressed as a deep neural network. We pre-train the strategy by supervision from synthetic market data, thereby decreasing the exploration time required for learning during negotiation. As a result, we can build automated agents for concurrent negotiations that can adapt to different e-market settings without the need to be pre-programmed. Our experimental evaluation shows that our deep reinforcement learning based agents outperform two existing well-known negotiation strategies in one-to-many concurrent bilateral negotiations for a range of e-market settings.

We present a novel negotiation model that allows an agent to learn how to negotiate during concurrent bilateral negotiations in unknown and dynamic e-markets. The agent uses an actor-critic architecture with model-free reinforcement learning to learn a strategy expressed as a deep neural network. We pre-train the strategy by supervision from synthetic market data, thereby decreasing the exploration time required for learning during negotiation. As a result, we can build automated agents for concurrent negotiations that can adapt to different e-market settings without the need to be pre-programmed. Our experimental evaluation shows that our deep reinforcement learning based agents outperform two existing well-known negotiation strategies in one-to-many concurrent bilateral negotiations for a range of e-market settings.

We develop a novel strategy that supports software agents to make decisions on how to negotiate for a resource in open and dynamic e-markets. Although existing negotiation strategies offer a number of sophisticated features, including modelling an opponent and negotiating with many opponents simultaneously, they abstract away from the dynamicity of the market and the model that the agent holds for itself in terms of ongoing negotiations, thus ignoring information that increases an agent’s utility. Our proposed strategy COncurrent Negotiating AgeNts ( Conan ) considers a weighted combination of modelling the market environment and the progress of concurrent negotiations in which the agent partakes. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the strategy’s performance in various settings where different opponents from the literature provide a competitive market. Our experiments provide statistically significant results showing how Conan outperforms the state-of-the-art in terms of the utility gained during negotiations.