MS Ecommerce course 20-853 Electronic Negotiation Summer 2004 - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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MS Ecommerce course 20-853 Electronic Negotiation Summer 2004

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Title: MS Ecommerce course 20-853 Electronic Negotiation Summer 2004


1
MS Ecommerce course 20-853 Electronic
NegotiationSummer 2004
  • Professor Tuomas Sandholm
  • School of Computer Science
  • Carnegie Mellon University

Instructors web page www.cs.cmu.edu/sandholm
Course web page http//www.cs.cmu.edu/gilpin/ec
20-853/ec20-853.htm
2
Course content at a high level
  • Covers the state-of-the-art
  • Covers
  • game-theoretic aspects
  • computational aspects
  • Additional readings (and proofs of claims) are
    available on the web site of my PhD-level course
    Foundations of Electronic Marketplaces

3
Motivation
4
Automated negotiation systems
  • Agents search make contracts
  • Through peer-to-peer negotiation or a mediated
    marketplace
  • Agents can be real-world parties or software
    agents that work on behalf of real-world parties
  • Increasingly important from a practical
    perspective
  • Developing communication infrastructure
    (Internet, WWW, NII, EDI, KQML, FIPA, Concordia,
    Voyager, Odyssey, Aglets, AgentTCL, Java Applets,
    ...)
  • Electronic commerce on the Internet Goods,
    services, information, bandwidth, computation,
    storage...
  • Industrial trend toward virtual enterprises
    outsourcing
  • Automated negotiation allows dynamically formed
    alliances on a per order basis in order to
    capitalize on economies of scale, and allow the
    parties to stay separate when there are
    diseconomies of scale

5
Automated negotiation systems
  • Fertile, timely area
  • Deep theories from game-theory computer science
    merge
  • Started together in the 1940s Morgenstern von
    Neumann
  • There were a few decades of little interplay
  • Upswing of interplay in the last few years
  • It is in this setting that the prescriptive
    (normative) power of game theory really comes
    into play
  • Market rules need to be explicitly specified
  • Software agents designed so as to act optimally
  • unlike humans ("As far as the laws of mathematics
    refer to reality, they are not certain and as
    far as they are certain, they do not refer to
    reality. - Albert Einstein)
  • Computational capabilities can be quantitatively
    characterized, and prescriptions can be made
    about how the agents should use their computation
    optimally

6
Systems with self-interested agents
(computational or human)
  • Mechanism (e.g., rules of an auction) specifies
    legal actions for each agent how the outcome is
    determined as a function of the agents
    strategies
  • Strategy (e.g., bidding strategy) Agents
    mapping from known history to action
  • Rational self-interested agent chooses its
    strategy to maximize its own expected utility
    given the mechanism
    gt strategic analysis required for
    robustness


    gt noncooperative game theory
  • But computational complexity
  • In executing the mechanism
  • In determining the optimal strategy
  • In executing the optimal strategy
  • Has significant impact on prescriptions
  • Has received little attention in game theory

7
A bold vision How automated negotiation
techniques could play a role in different stages
of an ecommerce transaction
8
Automated negotiation techniques in different
ecommerce stages
  • 1. Interest generation
  • Funded adlets that coordinate
  • Avatars for choosing which ads to read
  • Customer models for choosing who to send ads and
    how much to offer
  • 2. Finding
  • Simple early systems BargainFinder, Jango
  • Meta-data, XML
  • Standardized feature lists on goods to allow
    comparison
  • How do these get (re)negotiated
  • Different vendors prefer different feature lists
  • Shopper agents need to understand the new lists
  • How do machine learning algorithms cope with new
    features?
  • Want to get a bundle gt need to find many vendors

9
Automated negotiation techniques in different
ecommerce stages...
  • 3. Negotiating
  • Advantages of dynamic pricing
  • Right things sold to (and bought from) right
    parties at right time
  • World becomes a better place (social welfare
    increases)
  • Further advantages from discriminatory pricing
  • Can increase social welfare
  • Fixed-menu take-it-or-leave-it offers -gt
    negotiation
  • Cost of generating disseminating catalogs?
  • Other customers see the price?
  • Negotiation overhead?
  • Personalized menus (check customers web page,
    links to from it, what other similar customers
    did, customer profiles)
  • Generating/printing the menu may be intractable,
    e.g. mortgages 530
  • Negotiation will focus the generation, but vendor
    may bias prices offerings based on path
  • Preferences over bundles
  • Coalition formation

10
Automated negotiation techniques in different
ecommerce stages...
  • 4. Contract execution
  • Digital payment schemes
  • Safe exchange
  • Third party escrow companies
  • Tradesafe Inc.
  • Tradenable Inc.
  • i-Escrow Inc.
  • Sometimes an exchange can be carried out without
    enforcement by dividing it into chunks
    SandholmLesser IJCAI-95, Sandholm96,97,
    SandholmFerrandon ICMAS-00, SandholmWang
    AAAI-02
  • 5. After sales

11
Example applications
  • Application classes
  • B2B (business-to-business), e.g. procurement
    RFPs/RFQs, buying consortia (e.g. Covisint),
  • B2C (business-to-consumer), e.g. goods, debt
  • C2C (consumer-to-consumer), e.g. eBay
  • Task and resource allocation in computer systems
    (networks, computational grids, storage systems)
  • Just a few example application areas
  • Electricity markets
  • Manufacturing subcontracting
  • Transportation exchanges
  • Stock markets
  • Collaborative filtering

12
Basics
  • Agenthood,
  • utility function,
  • evaluation criteria of multiagent systems

13
Agenthood
  • We use economic definition of agent as locus of
    self-interest
  • Could be implemented e.g. as several mobile
    agents
  • Agent attempts to maximize its expected utility
  • Utility function ui of agent i is a mapping from
    outcomes to reals
  • Can be over a multi-dimensional outcome space
  • Incorporates agents risk attitude (allows
    quantitative tradeoffs)
  • E.g. outcomes over money

Lottery 1 0.5M w.p. 1 Lottery 2 1M w.p.
0.5 0 w.p. 0.5 Agents strategy is
the choice of lottery
Risk aversion gt insurance companies
14
Utility functions are scale-invariant
  • Agent i chooses a strategy that maximizes
    expected utility
  • maxstrategy Soutcome p(outcome strategy)
    ui(outcome)
  • If ui() a ui() b for a gt 0 then the agent
    will choose the same strategy under utility
    function ui as it would under ui
  • Note that ui has to be finite for each possible
    outcome
  • Otherwise expected utility could be infinite for
    several strategies, so the strategies could not
    be compared.

15
Criteria for evaluating multiagent systems
  • Computational efficiency
  • Distribution of computation
  • Communication efficiency
  • Social welfare maxoutcome ?i ui(outcome)
  • Requires cardinal utility comparison
  • but we just said that utility functions are
    arbitrary in terms of scale!
  • Surplus social welfare of outcome social
    welfare of status quo
  • Constant sum games have 0 surplus. Markets are
    not constant sum
  • Pareto efficiency An outcome o is Pareto
    efficient if there exists no other outcome o
    s.t. some agent has higher utility in o than in
    o and no agent has lower
  • Implied by social welfare maximization
  • Individual rationality Participating in the
    negotiation (or individual deal) is no worse than
    not participating
  • Stability No agents can increase their utility
    by changing their strategies
  • Symmetry No agent should be inherently
    preferred, e.g. dictator
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