Automated negotiation has emerged as a critical area of research in multiagent systems, with applications spanning e-commerce, resource allocation, and autonomous decision-making. This paper presents ChargingBoul, a negotiating agent that competed in the 2022 Automated Negotiating Agents Competition (ANAC) and placed second in individual utility by an exceptionally narrow margin. ChargingBoul employs a lightweight yet effective strategy that balances concession and opponent modeling to achieve high negotiation outcomes. The agent classifies opponents based on bid patterns, dynamically adjusts its bidding strategy, and applies a concession policy in later negotiation stages to maximize utility while fostering agreements. We evaluate ChargingBoul's performance using competition results and subsequent studies that have utilized the agent in negotiation research. Our analysis highlights ChargingBoul's effectiveness across diverse opponent strategies and its contributions to advancing automated negotiation techniques. We also discuss potential enhancements, including more sophisticated opponent modeling and adaptive bidding heuristics, to improve its performance further.

With the rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs), recent studies have drawn attention to their potential for handling not only simple question-answer tasks but also more complex conversational abilities and performing human-like behavioral imitations. In particular, there is considerable interest in how accurately LLMs can reproduce real human emotions and behaviors, as well as whether such reproductions can function effectively in real-world scenarios. However, existing benchmarks focus primarily on knowledge-based assessment and thus fall short of sufficiently reflecting social interactions and strategic dialogue capabilities. To address these limitations, this work proposes a methodology to quantitatively evaluate the human emotional and behavioral imitation and strategic decision-making capabilities of LLMs by employing a Buy and Sell negotiation simulation. Specifically, we assign different personas to multiple LLMs and conduct negotiations between a Buyer and a Seller, comprehensively analyzing outcomes such as win rates, transaction prices, and SHAP values. Our experimental results show that models with higher existing benchmark scores tend to achieve better negotiation performance overall, although some models exhibit diminished performance in scenarios emphasizing emotional or social contexts. Moreover, competitive and cunning traits prove more advantageous for negotiation outcomes than altruistic and cooperative traits, suggesting that the assigned persona can lead to significant variations in negotiation strategies and results. Consequently, this study introduces a new evaluation approach for LLMs' social behavior imitation and dialogue strategies, and demonstrates how negotiation simulations can serve as a meaningful complementary metric to measure real-world interaction capabilities-an aspect often overlooked in existing benchmarks.

Recently, a very simple new bilateral negotiation strategy called MiCRO was introduced that does not make use of any kind of opponent modeling or machine learning techniques and that does not require fine-tuning of any parameters. Despite its simplicity, it was shown that MiCRO performs similar to -- or even better than -- most state-of-the-art negotiation strategies. This lead its authors to argue that the benchmark domains on which negotiation algorithms are typically tested may be too simplistic. However, one question that was left open, was how MiCRO could be generalized to multilateral negotiations. In this paper we fill this gap by introducing a multilateral variant of MiCRO. We compare it with the winners of the Automated Negotiating Agents Competitions (ANAC) of 2015, 2017 and 2018 and show that it outperforms them. Furthermore, we perform an empirical game-theoretical analysis to show that our new version of MiCRO forms an empirical Nash equilibrium.

The research field of automated negotiation has a long history of designing agents that can negotiate with other agents. Such negotiation strategies are traditionally based on manual design and heuristics. More recently, reinforcement learning approaches have also been used to train agents to negotiate. However, negotiation problems are diverse, causing observation and action dimensions to change, which cannot be handled by default linear policy networks. Previous work on this topic has circumvented this issue either by fixing the negotiation problem, causing policies to be non-transferable between negotiation problems or by abstracting the observations and actions into fixed-size representations, causing loss of information and expressiveness due to feature design. We developed an end-to-end reinforcement learning method for diverse negotiation problems by representing observations and actions as a graph and applying graph neural networks in the policy. With empirical evaluations, we show that our method is effective and that we can learn to negotiate with other agents on never-before-seen negotiation problems. Our result opens up new opportunities for reinforcement learning in negotiation agents.

Large language models LLMs like ChatGPT have reached the 100 Mio user barrier in record time and might increasingly enter all areas of our life leading to a diverse set of interactions between those Artificial Intelligence models and humans. While many studies have discussed governance and regulations deductively from first-order principles, few studies provide an inductive, data-driven lens based on observing dialogues between humans and LLMs especially when it comes to non-collaborative, competitive situations that have the potential to pose a serious threat to people. In this work, we conduct a user study engaging over 40 individuals across all age groups in price negotiations with an LLM. We explore how people interact with an LLM, investigating differences in negotiation outcomes and strategies. Furthermore, we highlight shortcomings of LLMs with respect to their reasoning capabilities and, in turn, susceptiveness to prompt hacking, which intends to manipulate the LLM to make agreements that are against its instructions or beyond any rationality. We also show that the negotiated prices humans manage to achieve span a broad range, which points to a literacy gap in effectively interacting with LLMs.

Online games are dynamic environments where players interact with each other, which offers a rich setting for understanding how players negotiate their way through the game to an ultimate victory. This work studies online player interactions during the turn-based strategy game, Diplomacy. We annotated a dataset of over 10,000 chat messages for different negotiation strategies and empirically examined their importance in predicting long- and short-term game outcomes. Although negotiation strategies can be predicted reasonably accurately through the linguistic modeling of the chat messages, more is needed for predicting short-term outcomes such as trustworthiness. On the other hand, they are essential in graph-aware reinforcement learning approaches to predict long-term outcomes, such as a player's success, based on their prior negotiation history. We close with a discussion of the implications and impact of our work. The dataset is available at https://github.com/kj2013/claff-diplomacy.

Conversational systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, show exceptional proficiency in context understanding and response generation. However, despite their impressive capabilities, they still possess limitations, such as providing randomly-guessed answers to ambiguous queries or failing to refuse users' requests, both of which are considered aspects of a conversational agent's proactivity. This raises the question of whether LLM-based conversational systems are equipped to handle proactive dialogue problems. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of LLM-based conversational systems, specifically focusing on three aspects of proactive dialogue systems: clarification, target-guided, and non-collaborative dialogues. To trigger the proactivity of LLMs, we propose the Proactive Chain-of-Thought prompting scheme, which augments LLMs with the goal planning capability over descriptive reasoning chains. Empirical findings are discussed to promote future studies on LLM-based proactive dialogue systems.

We study whether multiple large language models (LLMs) can autonomously improve each other in a negotiation game by playing, reflecting, and criticizing. We are interested in this question because if LLMs were able to improve each other, it would imply the possibility of creating strong AI agents with minimal human intervention. We ask two LLMs to negotiate with each other, playing the roles of a buyer and a seller, respectively. They aim to reach a deal with the buyer targeting a lower price and the seller a higher one. A third language model, playing the critic, provides feedback to a player to improve the player's negotiation strategies. We let the two agents play multiple rounds, using previous negotiation history and AI feedback as in-context demonstrations to improve the model's negotiation strategy iteratively. We use different LLMs (GPT and Claude) for different roles and use the deal price as the evaluation metric. Our experiments reveal multiple intriguing findings: (1) Only a subset of the language models we consider can self-play and improve the deal price from AI feedback, weaker models either do not understand the game's rules or cannot incorporate AI feedback for further improvement. (2) Models' abilities to learn from the feedback differ when playing different roles. For example, it is harder for Claude-instant to improve as the buyer than as the seller. (3) When unrolling the game to multiple rounds, stronger agents can consistently improve their performance by meaningfully using previous experiences and iterative AI feedback, yet have a higher risk of breaking the deal. We hope our work provides insightful initial explorations of having models autonomously improve each other with game playing and AI feedback.

Bargaining can be used to resolve mixed-motive games in multi-agent systems. Although there is an abundance of negotiation strategies implemented in automated negotiating agents, most agents are based on single fixed strategies, while it is widely acknowledged that there is no single best-performing strategy for all negotiation settings. In this paper, we focus on bargaining settings where opponents are repeatedly encountered, but the bargaining problems change. We introduce a novel method that automatically creates and deploys a portfolio of complementary negotiation strategies using a training set and optimise pay-off in never-before-seen bargaining settings through per-setting strategy selection. Our method relies on the following contributions. We introduce a feature representation that captures characteristics for both the opponent and the bargaining problem. We model the behaviour of an opponent during a negotiation based on its actions, which is indicative of its negotiation strategy, in order to be more effective in future encounters. Our combination of feature-based methods generalises to new negotiation settings, as in practice, over time, it selects effective counter strategies in future encounters. Our approach is tested in an ANAC-like tournament, and we show that we are capable of winning such a tournament with a 5.6% increase in pay-off compared to the runner-up agent.

Understanding an opponent agent helps in negotiating with it. Existing works on understanding opponents focus on preference modeling (or estimating the opponent's utility function). An important but largely unexplored direction is recognizing an opponent's negotiation strategy, which captures the opponent's tactics, e.g., to be tough at the beginning but to concede toward the deadline. Recognizing complex, state-of-the-art, negotiation strategies is extremely challenging, and simple heuristics may not be adequate for this purpose. We propose a novel data-driven approach for recognizing an opponent's s negotiation strategy. Our approach includes a data generation method for an agent to generate domain-independent sequences by negotiating with a variety of opponents across domains, a feature engineering method for representing negotiation data as time series with time-step features and overall features, and a hybrid (recurrent neural network-based) deep learning method for recognizing an opponent's strategy from the time series of bids. We perform extensive experiments, spanning four problem scenarios, to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.