Research On Multi-Agent Team Negotiation Problem Based On Solidarity Behavior

With the increasing complexity of the business environment, team negotiation taken as the process of decision-making and interaction can solve the negotiation problem in the field of business. Although the effectiveness of team negotiation has been proven in some studies, the effects of team member’s solidarity behavior on the process and outcome of negotiation have not been explored yet. On the one side, for the negotiation parties the interest conflicts may emerge in the team negotiation process. On the other hand, team members have the individual value judgment and make decisions inspired by the whole negotiation goal. For the sake of the team’s interests, many individuals tend to make concession or sacrifice their own interests to benefit others, which embodied the solidarity characteristic. Therefore, in this paper the concession strategy based on solidarity mechanism is introduced to deal with the interest conflicts, and the effects of solidarity behavior on the multi-Agent team negotiation are analyzed.In the team negotiation environment, it is important that how to effectively apply negotiation strategy to enhance the overall performance. The solidarity behavior is one of the important team characteristics. And how it affects the negotiation process thus influencing the overall performance in the team is a topic worthy of investigation. In this paper, first of all, the operating-mechanism of solidarity behavior applied in negotiation process is elaborated and then the Multi-Agent team negotiation problem of based on Solidarity behavior and its formal definition are presented. Secondly, both of the negotiation strategy and the negotiation protocol related to solidarity behavior are described. In order to simulate the interaction process, the Agent-based simulation approach is introduced. In terms of the negotiation strategy, the agents with solidarity characteristic make a contribution to others on the beneficiary’s preferred attributes eliminate the interest conflicts emerged in the negotiation, and then achieve the whole negotiation goal. Thirdly, considering the different principles of beneficiary selection in the concession process, two different concession ways including the deviation-maximum way and the incrementmaximum way are introduced. At last, under various negotiation conditions, including the utility standards, the concession extent, the attribute preference and the power, it may exert different influences on negotiation performance. Simulation experiments were conducted to explore the effects of the two concession ways on the outcome of negotiation under these different conditions.The experimental results show that the concession strategy based on solidarity mecha nism can be used to solve the interest conflicts in the negotiation process, and enhance the negotiation performance. So the positive significance of solidarity characteristic is verified, and various factors need to be comprehensively taken into account to reach an agreement efficiently in the negotiation process.