This action funds Benjamin James Wright of New Mexico State University to conduct a research project, entitled "Developing Formal Models of Dishonest Negotiation," during the summer of 2012 at Wakayama University in Wakayama, Japan. The host scientist is Dr. Chiaka Sakama.
The Intellectual Merit of the research project is in revealing how negotiations can be expressed in a different way and then viewed from a new perspective. A likely outcome is a new perspective on what is possible in mutl-agent negotiations and with multi-agent action languages, which can be used to represent new formal models.
Broader Impacts of an EAPSI fellowship include providing the Fellow a first-hand research experience outside the U.S.; an introduction to the science, science policy, and scientific infrastructure of the respective location; and an orientation to the society, culture and language. These activities meet the NSF goal to educate for international collaborations early in the career of its scientists, engineers, and educators, thus ensuring a globally aware U.S. scientific workforce.
Over the summer of 2012, research was conducted at Wakayama University in Wakayama, Japan to explore adding the ability to lie for programs modeling negotiations. In everyday occurrence, many people lie beneficially. Some people may do so to gain an upper hand, others to do less work than required, and for others there may be other reasons. So far however, programs that benefit or prosper for themselves, or the entities they represent, have not largely utilized this ability. While there has been much research in the area of optimizing rewards and minimizing costs for programs in their negotiations, this has largely focused on minimizing truthful costs and rewards. The research in Japan was done under the guidance of an expert in the area of dishonest negotiation to pursue the implementation of two examples in which lying can be used to the benefit of the parties involved in the negotiation. In order to implement these examples, the area of logic programming was utilized to be able to describe the example domain and its actions and facts in a declarative manner . Declarative programs are useful because they focus on defining the rules and known facts a program works on. This is very appropriate to negotiations because rules for when to agree to a negotiation or what happens when an agreement has been reached can be written in a straightforward manner. Additionally, by writing about the known facts it is easy to setup the basis for a negotiation. For instance some facts for a negotiation could be that one party has $50 and the other has a music player. The method used to implement the reasoning behind theses negotiations is taken from an area of research known as Planning – where the concept is to start from some known area and find the necessary tasks required to enter some other desired area. An easy example of planning would be that of a GPS device in a car; given a destination the GPS tells you directions in order to reach it. Negotiations can be thought in this way as well due to the fact that at the beginning of a negotiation it is known what you have, what you are willing to negotiate over, and what you want from said negotiation. The use of lying and deception in negotiations adds a clear benefit when done properly. As mentioned above, negotiations work on what is known in the negotiation and what negotiators are willing to give. If either side of a negotiation knows they can get away with not telling the other side portions of their resources, they’ll do it. By adding dishonesty into negotiations, we are trying to increase the expressiveness and practicality that current negotiation models have.
