Research On Bilateral Multi-Issue Automated Negotiation Model In EC Environment

With the rapid development of network technology, e-commerce systems, as a new means of the rapid development of business, are increasingly drawing more and more attention in recent years. In order to resolve the conflicts and disputations in commerce activities, negotiation is used in most cases to reach an agreement. Traditional negotiation is usually conducted face to face by the buyers and sellers, which will surely wastes lots of manpower, materials and time. Some times it may be influenced by environment and human factors to bring some unfairness and randomicity. Automated negotiation can resolve such problems.Based on comprehensive analyzing of the existed automated negotiation model at home and abroad, the core problems in automated negotiation have been studied in this paper, including value function, negotiation strategy and negotiation decision. Then, a bilateral multi-issue automated negotiation model (BMIAN) has been established. Mixed merits of both the package deal negotiation and the sequential negotiation, and based on the weight of issue, which determines the order of the negotiation, this model has decomposed multi-issue negotiation into multistage negotiation. Only one issue is negotiated in each stage. All issues are included in one offer, and once an issue has come to its unanimous, it would be ignored in the following steps.The negotiation strategy based on time has been studied, and a decision-making function of time has been proposed, then a strategy of forming offer and updating counter-offer has been designed. There are three negotiation strategies based on time constraints, which are boulware, conceder and linear, the two sides of negotiator will decide to choose which one to response.The result of the emulate experience of bilateral multi-issue automated negotiation model shows that, this model can not only conquer the shortcomings of those negotiation models proposed before, but also reduce the average times for exchange offers, thus, advanced the chance of success of negotiation remarkably.