Modeling A Multi-Issue Negotiation Protocol For Agent Extensible Negotiations

In this paper, we study how to achieve more effective negotiations by extending during the negotiation process, the negotiation object with new relevant items. Indeed, the possibility to extend the initial set of items defined by the requester agent with other items related to the original query can help find an agreement. In doing so, with extended proposals, the requester agent may be incentivized to be more flexible, e.g., by making concessions or relaxing some constraints on the issues. This may help to achieve an agreement which is more beneficial for both parties than breaking down the negotiation. Such extensible negotiations may lead to win-win outcomes which otherwise can not be achieved with some usual negotiation strategies where it is hard to dynamically alter the set of items under negotiation during the course of the process. In this paper, we first outline a negotiation strategy which allows the extension of the negotiation space by extending the negotiation object with new relevant items. Based on this, we then propose a new multi-issue negotiation protocol which relies on the bidding-based mechanism and deals with such extensible negotiation strategies.