Efficient agent-based negotiation by predicting opponent preferences using AHP

Negotiation is a process essential for a wide range of applications. The complex decision making involved in negotiation makes its automation difficult. The complexity is further increased as negotiators hide their individual preferences from each other to avoid exploitation by the opponent. Even though sharing of private preference information leads to better agreement for both sides, it is never done in the absence of trust. In this work, we learn opponent’s preference information from the offers given by the opponent using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). We apply our approach to the negotiation of Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters for the establishment of Service Level Agreements (SLA) between a provider and a consumer. Experiments show that using AHP, the negotiations are faster and the agreements are on or nearer to the pareto-optimal line.

Efficient agent-based negotiation by predicting opponent preferences using AHP

Negotiation is a process essential for a wide range of applications. The complex decision making involved in negotiation makes its automation difficult. The complexity is further increased as negotiators hide their individual preferences from each other to avoid exploitation by the opponent. Even though sharing of private preference information leads to better agreement for both sides, it is never done in the absence of trust. In this work, we learn opponent’s preference information from the offers given by the opponent using Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). We apply our approach to the negotiation of Quality-of-Service (QoS) parameters for the establishment of Service Level Agreements (SLA) between a provider and a consumer. Experiments show that using AHP, the negotiations are faster and the agreements are on or nearer to the pareto-optimal line.

John Henry Newman on faith and reason

The author explains how, in contrast with the risk “of the twin reduction of faith to a mere emotive principle and reason to a mechanical exercise”, Newman seeks to re-define and widen the concepts of reason and philosophy, so that, free from rationalism, philosophy and reason can again give sense to one’s lived experience. A reason so widened by the “experience of life” and by a living heart will be much more able to welcome a faith which is given to it not as a right, or as syllogism, or as a burden, but as gift of love. Thus, faith is no longer seen as something irrational, distant, accidental, as if it were a simple “private preference”. Instead, it becomes a very reasonable and warm impulse that changes man’s perspective over his existence and his Christian commitment, and transfigures him towards a life of holiness.

Preference Coalition Formation Scheme for Buyer Coalition Services with Bundles of Items

Coalition stability is a major requirement in coalition formation. One important problem to achieve stability in n-person game theories is the assumption that the preference of each buyer is publicly known. The coalition is said to be stable if there are no objection by any subset of buyers according to their publicly known preferences. However, such assumption is often unrealistic in typical real-life situations. Individual buyers often have private preferences and make their decisions according to their own preferences instead. This study proposes a novel preference coalition formation scheme for buyer coalition services that attempts to consider private preference of individual buyers within the buyer coalition process. The theoretical foundations of the study are rooted in the fields of multi-criteria decision making, human practical reasoning, and n-person game theories, from which we design an appropriate scheme for our proposed buyer coalition framework with emphasis on private preferences of individual buyers. The authors validate their proposed scheme with simulation software developed to demonstrate results of a variety of practical situations.