Intelligent agents for negotiations in market games, Part 1: Model

In competitive markets, human decision-makers need assistance to determine potential coalitions that they can be part of. Note that such coalitions are legal provided market power is not monopolized. We present an approach for designing specialized intelligent software agents that perform negotiations on behalf of their human counterparts, and then suggest market strategies that the human can adopt. Our negotiation protocol is derived from cooperative game theory; however, it differs from the game theory literature in requiring virtually no trustworthy information exchange between the potential coalition partners. In this paper, we present the negotiation model. In the companion paper [1], we apply it to power markets.