27, On the Benefits of Exploiting Hierarchical Goals in Bilateral Automated Negotiation

Some thoughts following on from re-reading 'On the Benefits of Exploiting Hierarchical Goals in Bilateral Automated Negotiation' (2007) by Iyad Rahwan et al with my aamas-submitted (not accepted) paper in mind:

• What is presented is a protocol and not a generative model as such.


• The negotiation framework consists of (/is limited to) two agents.


• Agents' preferences over (sets of) resources is specified as a (pre-given) numerical utility function. "Deals" between agents (to reallocate resources) make use of "side payments" based on this utility function.


• The relationship "sub" (linking a goal to "sub" -goals and/or -resources needed to achieve it) seems shared between all agents (though agents have no prior knowledge of each other's main goals or preferences).


• Much in this paper rests on the existence/allowance of "partial plans" (wherein leaf nodes may be goals as well as resources) and the setting of positive interaction between agents' "shared"/"common" goals such that an agent may benefit from a common goal (or sub-goal) achieved by the other agent.

EUMAS 08 Conference

Attended and presented at the EUMAS conference last week in Bath. Received some useful questions/feedback to think about, as follows:

• The title ('On the benefits of argumentation for negotiation - preliminary version') is a bit misleading (given the narrow scope of this work). Also, should think about potential/real drawbacks of using argumentation for negotiation as well as its benefits, i.e. look at things more objectively.


• Look at game-theoretic models. Contrast my work with theirs. Agents providing reasons/justifications with requests as in this paper would not be enough (in and of itself) to argue argumentation-based negotiation (ABN) over game-theoretic (GT) approaches. For example, the act of an agent providing a reason with a request may not always be advantageous; providing a reason could rule out an "offer" (in the mind of the recipient agent) that would otherwise have been acceptable. It may (also) not always be strategically advantageous for an agent to provide reasons with its requests since the recipient agent could use this against the requesting agent.


• Agents providing reasons with dialogue moves doesn't increase the number of solutions possible unless agents provide their overlying goals with their reasons, like the "hammer and nail" example in an earlier paper. Otherwise agents are only justifying their dialogue moves.


• How come reasons can be provided with a 'refuse' response but not with an 'accept'?


• The work of Nicolas Hormazabal ('Trust aware negotiation') could be useful.


• The presentation was perhaps overly simplistic. Looks a bit like I have created/used a problem/solution to justify argumentation and not the other way round, i.e. rather than creating/using an argumentative approach to solve a real problem. Also, sequences/concurrency of the dialogues: it was not clear from the presentation; it came across as though only one dialogue move/instance is made at a time in sequence regardless of the number of agents in the agent system.


• A story from Cuba (spurred by my bilateral agent negotiation approach): each person prefers the house of his neighbour (only) over his own, creating a big circle of potential swaps. Eventually, (if/) once the circle is established/known, each person moves into the house of his neighbour resulting in a happier society. Point being: why not have everyone report their desires/preferences publicly and have the final result/allocation decided upon centrally like in an auction? Wouldn't that be easier?

Microfinance / BRAC

I made a mental note yesterday to read up on ‘microfinance’ later today when, lo and behold, I conveniently stumbled upon this advert on my way to university earlier today (the ...’s identify parts that I have skipped):

“... Crowded into thousands of impoverished villages. Powerless and therefore poor. Poor and therefore powerless.

Where to begin?...

Start with one village. Identify the stakeholders, the believers, the leaders who could make change happen. That would be women.

First, disaster relief. Then... Then... Then microfinance, the indispensible multiplier, the key to scaling up.

Money to pay for a cow. Fresh milk and something wondrous called ‘income’. The cow became a dairy, then a milk distribution business...

Soon there was $5 billion in micro-loans, 7 million borrowers, 265,000 village organizations, 52,000 schools, 8.5 million jobs and new ventures in eight other Asian and African countries...”

(Source: ‘BRAC’ advert found in ‘The Economist’, www.brac.net)

If anyone has information or recommended reading/listening/viewing regarding microfinance/microloans, please share. Thanks.

jabberwacky chatbot

Really cool chatbot:
http://www.jabberwacky.com
Have a conversation with it, or one of its variants:
http://www.jabberwacky.com/george
http://www.icogno.com/joan.html

Multiagent Resource Alloaction

Nice definition (taken from the '3rd MARA Get-Together: Workshop on Multiagent Resource Allocation'):

"the allocation of resources within a system of autonomous agents that not only have preferences over alternative allocations of resources but also actively participate in computing an allocation."

Argument evaluation in implementations of negotiation policies

Finished modifying the implementations of the eumas- and aamas- negotiation policies to use (call) the new general argument evaluation procedure. Seems to be working fine (in Linux).

Running the implementations on Windows

Still having problems compiling and running the eumas- and aamas- implementations in Windows. The problem seems to be with the Windows Sicstus prologbeans libraries but I am not entirely sure. Will leave this for know, complete the implementations for Linux and maybe return to this later.