New Mechanisms for Mixing Time- and Behaviour-Dependent Tactics in Negotiation Strategies

This paper studies three different mixing mechanisms for creating negotiation strategies out of single tactics. It shows that a mechanism introduced by Faratin et al can result in a non-monotonic behaviour in a negotiation strategy in some scenarios where the time- and behavior- dependent tactics are mixed. In single issue negotiations this behaviour seems irrational and the paper proposes an additional simple constraint to solve that problem. Moreover two new mixing mechanisms are introduced and discussed: one based on individual negotiation threads of all imitative tactics and one based on single concessions. Results of an experiment demonstrate that the two new methods gain on average higher utilities than the constrained original method but at the same time can increase the risk to fail negotiation in some scenarios.