Preferences and Learning in Multi-Agent Negotiation

In online, dynamic environments, the service requested by consumers may not be readily served by the producers. This requires the consumers and producers to negotiate on the content of the service. To automate this process, agents play a key role in e-commerce. As far as the agents’ negotiation strategies are concerned, understanding and reasoning on their users’ preferences are important to generate the right offers on behalf of their users. Besides taking other participant’s needs into account is important to be able to negotiate effectively. However, preferences of participants are almost always private. The best that can happen is that participants may learn each other’s preferences through interactions over time. As agents learn each other’s preferences, they can provide better-targeted offers and thus enable faster negotiation. My research direction involves representing and reasoning on preferences, and learning preferences though interaction in automated negotiation.