POMDP based Negotiation Modeling

As the world gets increasingly connected, business and political negotiations need to happen not just between people of similar cultural background but also across people of different cultures. An agent-based computational model of negotiation would help in understanding and improving the inter-cultural negotiation process. A major challenge in the development of such autonomous agents lies in developing the reasoning model of the agent. In this paper, we discuss the issues and challenges of developing a POMDP-based agent model for inter-cultural negotiation. POMDPs are promising for the following reasons: (a) POMDPs provide a decentralized way of solving the problem which is an inherent characteristic of the negotiation domain. (b) POMDPs provide a natural way to capture the sequential nature of the bargaining process i.e. they capture the process rather than just focusing on the outcome. (c) POMDPs can express the various important factors that affect negotiation such as culture.