Little work has been done to study negotiation between these
two extreme cases.
When an agent is negotiating with other agents over task
performance and/or resource consumption, it must explicitly
reason about the value of performing/not-performing the tasks
or allocating/not-allocating the resource. The way in which
the value is computed differs depending on how the agent
chooses to evaluate its negotiations with the other agents. We
label an agent completely self-directed if it does not take into
consideration how much utility the other agent can potentially
gain when the local agent makes a commitment to complete
the requested task as a result of negotiation. In other words,
the agent is completely driven by the values that it locally
attaches to task performance or resource consumption. In
contrast, an agent is completely externally-directed if it sees
the other agent’s gain as its own in a 1:1 fashion. Note that
these labels identify how value or utility is computed and do
not relate to the agent’s overall objectives. We distinguish the
notion of agents being self-interested or cooperative from the
notion of an agent being self-directed or externally-directed.
We call an agent self-interested if its organizational goal is to
maximize only its local utility and an agent is cooperative if it
is intent on maximizing the overall social utility. Whereas the
“direction” terminology defines how value is computed by the
agent, the self-interested/cooperative terminology specifies the
agent’s overall goal. With respect to negotiation, the degree of
an agent’s self-interestedness/cooperativeness defines its metagoal
in terms of its overall relationship to the agent society,
while the degree of self-directness/externally-directness de-
fines the local mechanism used by an agent to help achieve
its meta-goal. For instance, if the agent is cooperative and
externally directed, it will work to maximize social welfare and
will base its computations, during negotiation, on the values
communicated to it by other agents. However, an agent who
is cooperative and self-directed will also work to maximize
social welfare, but based its own calculation/prediction of