Fuzzy guidance strategies for fair multi-agent negotiation of wholesale price contracts

In this paper, we investigate the negotiation aspect of wholesale price contracts in a supply chain with a retailer buying from several subcontractors. The objective is to help actors in an asymmetric informational context to reach agreements and establish fair contracts. Thus, we present two multi-agent models with the same architecture; a retailer agent negotiating with several subcontractor agents and a fair agent trying to provide some fairness guidance in the negotiation. In the first model (AGS), the fair agent intervenes when an agent makes a relatively low or high offer; he asks this agent to behave differently. In the second model (DGS), the fair agent intervenes when a significant difference appears between the margin rates of the negotiators; he directs them by giving the new rate to apply in the next step. Experiments show more fair results with DGS than AGS.