Page 260 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

Chapter 30

MULTI-AGENT CONTRACT NEGOTIATION

Knowledge and Computation Complexities

Peyman Faratin
MIT Sloan School of Management

Abstract Two computational decision models are presented for the problem of de-central-
ized contracting of multi-dimensional services and goods between autonomous
agents. The assumption of the models is that agents are bounded in both infor-
mation and computation. Heuristic and approximate solution techniques from
Artificial Intelligenceareusedforthedesignofdecisionmechanismthat approach
mutual selection of efficient contracts.

1. Introduction

The problem of interest in this chapter is how autonomous computational
agents can approach an efficient trading of multi-dimensional services or goods
under assumptions of bounded rationality. Trading is assumed to involve ne-
gotiation, a resolution mechanism for conflicting preferences between selfish
agents. We restrict ourselves to a monopolistic economy of two trading agents
that meet only once to exchange goods and services. Agents are assumed to be
bounded in both information and computation. Information needed for decision
making is assumed to be bounded due to both external and internal factors, so-
cial and local information respectively. Agents have limited social information
because they are assumed to be selfish, sharing little or no information. In ad-
dition to this agents may also have limited local information (for example over
their own preferences) because of complexity of their local task(s). Computa-
tion, in turn, is a problem in contract negotiation because of the combinatorics
of scale. Computation is informally defined as the process of searching a space
of possibilities [11]. For a contract with issues and only two alternatives
for each issue, the size of the search space is roughly possible contracts,
too large to be explored exhaustively.