Showing papers by "Ya'akov Gal published in 2005"

Adapting to agents' personalities in negotiation

Abstract: To establish cooperative relationships, agents must be willing to engage in helpful behavior and to keep their commitments to other agents. However, in uncertain and dynamic environments, it is difficult to identify the degree of helpfulness of other agents. This paper describes a model in which agents' helpfulness is characterized in terms of cooperation and reliability. An agent chooses an action based on its estimate of others' degree of helpfulness given the dependency relationships that hold between the agent and others. This model was evaluated in a negotiation game in which players needed to exchange resources to reach their goals, but did not have information about each others' resources. Results showed that agents using the model could identify and adapt to others' varying degree of helpfulness even while the other agents were constantly changing their strategy. Moreover, agents that varied their degree of helpfulness depending on their estimate of others' helpfulness outperformed agents who did not, as well as increased the social welfare of the group.