Negotiation Networks

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This research involves the development of automated negotiation protocols for autonomous agents in negotiation networks, where each agent can only negotiate with few selected neighbors. That is, we develop agents that can carry out any number of simultaneous negotiations with other selfish agents. For example, they could be routers in the Internet negotiating over which packets to route and which to drop, or purchasing agents in a supply chain deciding what to buy and at what price, or web services deciding who to provide services for and at what price, or sensors in a sensor network deciding which measurements to make and who to forward the results. Our research involves building the negotiation strategies for selfish rational agents that individuals and companies will want to use, along with the negotiation protocols that ensure the agents'interactions result in efficient global resource allocations.The problem of negotiation networks combines features of characteristic form games and bargaining games from game theory, combinatorial auctions and distributed mechanism design from Economics, network exchange theory from Sociology, and distributed algorithm design from computer science. Our research brings together results from these disparate fields into one framework and provides algorithmic solutions for the dynamic, distributed problem of resource allocation among self-interested parties, in contrast with game theory and Economics' solutions which are typically steady-state axiomatic solutions. Success in this research is potentially transformative as it will provide the foundation for the engineering of protocols and efficient algorithms for distributed resource allocation, which is a pervasive problem in our ever-growing highly-interconnected society.