OAR: A Formal Framework for Multi-Agent Negotiation

Abstract

In Multi-Agent systems, agents often need to make deci-sions about how to interact with each other when negotiat-ing over task allocation. In this paper, we present OAR, a formal framework to address the question of how the agents should interact in an evolving environment in order to achieve their different goals. The traditional categorization of self-interested and cooperative agents is unified by adopting a util-ity view. We illustrate mathematically that the degree of co-operativeness of an agent and the degree of its self-directness are not directly related. We also show how OAR can be used to evaluate different negotiation strategies and to develop dis-tributed mechanisms that optimize the performance dynam-ically. This research demonstrates that sophisticated proba-bilistic modeling can be used to understand the behaviors of a system with complex agent interactions.