An Automated Bilateral Negotiation about Price and Quantity in E-Commerce

Automated negotiation about price and quantity is increasingly common in e-commerce. This paper presents an automated bilateral negotiation conducted by labor-saving and emotion-free autonomous agents. An automated negotiation may alleviate the difficulties inherent in human negotiations. To avoid a deadlock in which both agents are unwilling to concede may arise in the traditional alternating-offer pattern, a mediator agent is introduced. After outlining the negotiation workflow, we aim to analyze the correlation of price and quantity in a bilateral negotiation in different situations; then propose the negotiation methods how negotiate price and quantity for different situations. We hope the research can offer the guide for applying the proposed method to the e-commerce.