Articles

A key objective of the competition has been to analyze and search the design space of negotiating agents for agents that are able to operate effectively across a variety of domains. The competition is a valuable tool for studying important aspects of negotiation including profiles and domains, opponent learning, strategies, and bilateral and multilateral protocols. Two of the challenges that remain are how to develop argumentation-based negotiation agents that, in addition to making offers, can inform and argue to obtain an acceptable agreement for both parties; and how to create agents that can negotiate in a human fashion. Challenges lie in the complexity of the negotiation domain, in the strategies for bidding and accepting, for opponent modeling, and so on. Competitions have proved their value as useful and open benchmarking tools to evaluate and compare agents in a common setting (for example, the successful Annual Computer Poker Competition and the various Trading Agent Competitions).