Using Iterative Narrowing to Enable Multi-Party Negotiations with Multiple Interdependent Issues

MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 4648-07

CCI Working Paper No. 2007-003

9 Pages Posted: 4 Dec 2007 Last revised: 4 Feb 2008

See all articles by Hiromitsu Hattori

Hiromitsu Hattori

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management

Mark Klein

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Takayuki Ito

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management

Date Written: April 1, 2007

Abstract

Multi-issue negotiations are a central part of many coordination challenges, and thus represent an important research topic. Almost all previous work in this area has assumed that negotiation issues are independent, but this is rarely the case in real-world contexts. Our work focuses on negotiation with interdependent issues and, therefore, nonlinear (multi-optimum) agent utility functions. Since the utility functions are typically very complex, the challenge becomes finding high-quality negotiation outcomes without making unrealistic demands concerning how much agents reveal about their utilities. Since negotiations often involve more than two parties, the approach should also be scalable. In this paper, we propose a novel protocol for addressing these challenges, wherein agents approach agreements by iteratively narrowing the space of possible agreements. In the early stages, agents submit rough bids representing promising regions from their utility functions. In later stages, they submit increasingly narrow bids for the subset of those regions that the negotiating parties all liked. We show that our method outperforms existing methods in large nonlinear utility spaces, and is computationally feasible for negotiations with as many as ten agents.

Keywords: Multi-issue Negotiation

Suggested Citation

Hattori, Hiromitsu and Klein, Mark and Ito, Takayuki, Using Iterative Narrowing to Enable Multi-Party Negotiations with Multiple Interdependent Issues (April 1, 2007). MIT Sloan Research Paper No. 4648-07, CCI Working Paper No. 2007-003 , Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1041041 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1041041

Hiromitsu Hattori (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-416
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States

Mark Klein

Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( email )

77 Massachusetts Avenue
MIT E94-1505
Cambridge, MA 02139
United States
617-253-6796 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://cci.mit.edu/klein/

Takayuki Ito

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-416
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States

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