CONCLUSION AND FUTURE WORK
We introduce an integrative negotiation mechanism that
enables agents to interact over a spectrum of negotiation attitudes
from completely self-directed to completely externallydirected
in a uniform reasoning framework, namely the MQ
framework. The agent can not only choose to be self-directed
or externally-directed, but also can choose how externallydirected
it wants to be. This provides the agent with the
capability to dynamically adjust its negotiation attitude in a
complex agent society. Introducing this mechanism in the
agent framework also strengthens the capability of multiagent
systems to model human societies. Multi-agent systems
are important tools for developing and analyzing models and
theories of interactivity in human societies. There are many
complicated organizational relationships in human society,
and every person plays a number of different roles and
is involved in different organizations. A multi-agent system
with this integrative negotiation mechanism is an ideal testbed
to model human society and to study negotiation and
organization theories. Experimental work shows it may not be
a good idea to always be completely externally-directed in a
situation involving an unknown agent’s assistance; in that case,
choosing to be partially externally-directed may be appropriate
for both the individual agent and also for the society.
We recognize that the experimental results are scenario
specific and they do not answer the question about how
externally-directed an agent should be in a given situation.
In [15], we presented an analytical model of the environment
that enables the agent to predict the influence of its negotiation
attitude on its own performance and also on the social welfare,
hence to select the appropriate level of cooperation to balance
its own utility achievement and the social welfare. We plan to
develop learning techniques that enable an agent to learn from
its previous interactions with other agents about how to adjust
its negotiation attitude parameter.