Private provision of public roads through build-operate-transfer (BOT) contracts is increasing around the world. Under a BOT contract, a private firm would build a road, charge tolls to road users for a period, and then transfer the road to the government. By viewing a BOT contract as a combination of three variables of concession period, road capacity and toll charge, we study optimal BOT cont...

In multi-issue automated negotiation against unknown opponents, a key part of effective negotiation is the choice of concession strategy. In this paper, we develop a principled concession strategy, based on Gaussian processes predicting the opponent’s future behaviour. We then use this to set the agent’s concession rate dynamically during a single negotiation session. We analyse the performance...

Knowledge about conflict styles and time pressure during a negotiation are important factors in a negotiation. This knowledge is used to model an agentbased assistant for e-negotiations. The idea of the proposed method is to model a utility concession function depending on the conflict style behaviour of a negotiator. Negotiators, prior to engage in e-negotiations, are asked to fill in a questi...

BACKGROUND The fate of tropical forests is a global concern, yet many far-reaching decisions affecting forest resources are made locally. We explore allocation of logging rights using a case study from Loreto, Peruvian Amazonia, where millions of hectares of tropical rainforest were offered for concession in a competitive tendering process that addressed issues related to locality. METHODOLOG...

In this article, we consider the novel approach of a seller and customer negotiating bilaterally about a two-part tariff, using autonomous software agents. An advantage of this approach is that win–win opportunities can be generated while keeping the problem of preference elicitation as simple as possible. We develop bargaining strategies that software agents can use to conduct the actual bilat...

Concession-making behavior is an essential process in negotiations and auctions and has a critical impact on the outcomes of an exchange. In auctions, concessions relate to deciding on the next bid by bid-makers, while in negotiations they involve proposing next offers by both parties. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate concession-making by parties in multi-attribute auctio...