Article

Advantages of a leveled commitment contracting protocol

Authors:

Tuomas W. Sandholm,

Victor R. LesserAuthors Info & Claims

AAAI'96: Proceedings of the thirteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1

Pages 126 - 133

Published: 04 August 1996 Publication History

Abstract

In automated negotiation systems consisting of self-interested agents, contracts have traditionally been binding. Such contracts do not allow agents to efficiently accommodate future events. Game theory has proposed contingency contracts to solve this problem. Among computational agents, contingency contracts are often impractical due to large numbers of interdependent and unanticipated future events to be conditioned on, and because some events are not mutually observable. This paper proposes a leveled commitment contracting protocol that allows self-interested agents to efficiently accommodate future events by having the possibility of unilaterally decommitting from a contract based on local reasoning. A decommitment penalty is assigned to both agents in a contract: to be freed from the contract, an agent only pays this penalty to the other party. It is shown through formal analysis of several contracting settings that this leveled commitment feature in a contracting protocol increases Pareto efficiency of deals and can make contracts individually rational when no full commitment contract can. This advantage holds even if the agents decommit manipulatively.

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Cited By

Van Dyne MTsatsoulis C(2010)A comparison of agent decommitment techniques in a real-time environmentProceedings of the 9th WSEAS international conference on Artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering and data bases10.5555/1808036.1808083(271-279)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2010
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Konar DMazumdar C(2009)A generalised model of e-trading for gradual secret release fair exchange protocolInternational Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics10.1504/IJESDF.2009.0238802:1(101-111)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2009
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Babaioff MHartline JKleinberg RChuang JFortnow LPu P(2009)Selling ad campaignsProceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce10.1145/1566374.1566383(61-70)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2009
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cover image Guide Proceedings

AAAI'96: Proceedings of the thirteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1

August 1996

894 pages

ISBN:026251091X

Sponsors

AAAI: American Association for Artificial Intelligence

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AAAI Press

Publication History

Published: 04 August 1996

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Cited By

Van Dyne MTsatsoulis C(2010)A comparison of agent decommitment techniques in a real-time environmentProceedings of the 9th WSEAS international conference on Artificial intelligence, knowledge engineering and data bases10.5555/1808036.1808083(271-279)Online publication date: 20-Feb-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1808036.1808083
Konar DMazumdar C(2009)A generalised model of e-trading for gradual secret release fair exchange protocolInternational Journal of Electronic Security and Digital Forensics10.1504/IJESDF.2009.0238802:1(101-111)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1504/IJESDF.2009.023880
Babaioff MHartline JKleinberg RChuang JFortnow LPu P(2009)Selling ad campaignsProceedings of the 10th ACM conference on Electronic commerce10.1145/1566374.1566383(61-70)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1566374.1566383
Karunatillake NJennings NRahwan IMcBurney P(2009)Dialogue games that agents play within a societyArtificial Intelligence10.1016/j.artint.2009.02.002173:9-10(935-981)Online publication date: 1-Jun-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.artint.2009.02.002
Vig LAdams J(2007)Coalition FormationJournal of Intelligent and Robotic Systems10.1007/s10846-007-9150-050:1(85-118)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10846-007-9150-0
Matsubara SPechoucek MSteiner DThompson S(2005)Auction in dynamic environmentsProceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems10.1145/1082473.1082571(643-649)Online publication date: 25-Jul-2005
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1082473.1082571
Xueguang CHaigang SHaddad HOmicini AWainwright RLiebrock L(2004)Further extensions of FIPA Contract Net ProtocolProceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing10.1145/967900.967914(45-51)Online publication date: 14-Mar-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/967900.967914
Aknine SPinson SShakun M(2004)An Extended Multi-Agent Negotiation ProtocolAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1023/B:AGNT.0000009409.19387.f88:1(5-45)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2004
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1023/B%3AAGNT.0000009409.19387.f8
Karunatillake NJennings N(2004)Is it worth arguing?Proceedings of the First international conference on Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/978-3-540-32261-0_16(234-250)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2004
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Pasquier PFlores RChaib-draa B(2004)Modelling flexible social commitments and their enforcementProceedings of the 5th international conference on Engineering Societies in the Agents World10.1007/11423355_10(139-151)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2004
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