B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

390 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
process, a group of agents communicate with one another to come
up with a mutually acceptable agreement.
3. Design and implementation of any negotiating strategy and
collaboration protocol isn't easy. A great deal of research still needs
to be done, so that the negotiation strategy of any agent completely
replicates human behavior.
13.7.1. Types of negotiation strategies
There are two fundamental types of negotiation strategy, as follows:
Analytical Negotiation Strategies — They are based on static
mathematical models to evaluate outcomes and generate corresponding
actions. These strategies are usually reliable and stable in behavior.
However, since they are static in nature, they tend to have a predictable
outcome.
Evolutionary Negotiation Strategies — They are dynamic in nature and
adapt and evolve with time, learning by their behavior, environment and
through other agents. However, they are extremely complex and very
few implementations have been tried using such strategies.
13.7.2. Not revealing negotiation strategy paramount
If agents can somehow know what other agents are thinking and learn
during their interactions how other agents behave, their payoff might
increase. Learning in negotiation is tightly integrated with the issue of
how to model the overall negotiation process, i.e., what negotiation
protocols are adopted.
It is very important for agents to hide their negotiation strategies. If
the buyer agent knows the supplier agent's negotiation strategy (to
accept all offers as long as they are above a certain threshold value),
the buyer in this scenario can begin by offering a price lower than the
threshold value and repeatedly offering the seller a penny more each
time until the threshold value is reached. At this price, the supplier
agent would accept the price, which is obviously not the optimum one
from its perspective.