# A Negotiator's Backup Plan: Optimal Concessions with a Reservation Value

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.19361 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19361/

## Key facts

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- First posted on arXiv 30 Apr 2024.

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automated negotiation is a well-known mechanism for autonomous agents to reach agreements. To realize beneficial agreements quickly, it is key to employ a good bidding strategy. When a negotiating agent has a good back-up plan, i.e., a high reservation value, failing to reach an agreement is not necessarily disadvantageous. Thus, the agent can adopt a risk-seeking strategy, aiming for outcomes with a higher utilities. Accordingly, this paper develops an optimal bidding strategy called MIA-RVelous for bilateral negotiations with private reservation values. The proposed greedy algorithm finds the optimal bid sequence given the agent's beliefs about the opponent in O(n2D) time, with D the maximum number of rounds and n the number of outcomes. The results obtained here can pave the way to realizing effective concurrent negotiations, given that concurrent negotiations can serve as a (probabilistic) backup plan.