Adapting to Agents' Personalities in Negotiation

Abstract

To establish cooperative relationships, agents must be willing to engage in helpful behavior and to keep their commitments with agents who reciprocate this behavior. However, in uncertain and dynamic environments, it is difficult to identify the degree of helpfulness of other agents. This paper approaches this problem by characterizing agents’ helpfulness in terms of cooperation and reliability. An agent chooses an action based on other agents’ helpfulness as well as the dependency relationship between the agent and others. This model was evaluated in a negotiation game in which players needed to exchange resources to reach their goals, but did not have information about each other’s resources. Results showed that the model allowed agents to identify and to adapt to others’ varying degree of helpfulness, even while they are constantly changing their strategy. Moreover, agents who vary their cooperativeness and reliability depending on those traits of others, can outperform agents who do not, as well as increase the social welfare of the group.