Performance analysis for a multi-stage negotiation

It is not uncommon for negotiating agents to involve complex utility functions in the negotiation process. To search for an optimised solution in a large and complex space can be very time consuming. The choice of appropriate parameter settings for searching methods can have significant impact on the negotiation result. In this paper, we report a series of the experiments that have been carried out to analyze the performance of a multi-stage bi-lateral negotiation mechanism. Apart from the efficiency of processing time, two key criteria, joint total utility and the difference between the agents' degrees of satisfaction, were selected to measure the effectiveness of the proposed negotiation mechanism. © 2006 IEEE.