Tractable Negotiation in Tree-structured Domains
Yann Chevaleyre, Ulle Endriss, Nicolas Maudet

Abstract:
Multiagent resource allocation is a timely and exciting area of
research at the interface of Computer Science and Economics.  One of
the main challenges in this area is the high complexity of
negotiation. In particular, the complexity of the task of identifying
rational deals, i.e. deals that are beneficial for all participants,
often hinders the successful transfer of theoretical results to
practical applications. To address this issue, we propose several
protocols designed to tame the complexity of negotiation by exploiting
structural properties of the utility functions used by agents to model
their preferences over alternative bundles of resources. In
particular, we consider domains where utility functions are k-additive
(that is, synergies between different resources are restricted to
bundles of at most k items) and tree-structured in the sense that the
bundles for which there are synergies do not overlap. We show how
protocols exploiting these properties can allow for drastically
simplified negotiation processes.

Keywords: Multiagent Resource Allocation;  Negotiation