Abstract
Designing agents that can efficiently learn and integrate user's preferences into decision making processes is a key challenge in automated negotiation. While accurate knowledge of user preferences is highly desirable, eliciting the necessary information might be rather costly, since frequent user interactions may cause inconvenience. Therefore, efficient elicitation strategies (minimizing elicitation costs) for inferring relevant information are critical. We introduce a stochastic, inverse-ranking utility model compatible with the Gaussian Process preference learning framework and integrate it into a (belief) Markov Decision Process paradigm which formalizes automated negotiation processes with incomplete information. Our utility model, which naturally maps ordinal preferences (inferred from the user) into (random) utility values (with the randomness reflecting the underlying uncertainty), provides the basic quantitative modeling ingredient for automated (agent-based) negotiation.
Keywords
- Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Agreement Technologies: Negotiation and Contract-Based Systems
- Uncertainty in AI: Sequential Decision Making
- Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preference Modelling and Preference-Based Reasoning
- Uncertainty in AI: Uncertainty in AI
