Coalition deal negotiation for services

This paper investigates an optimal strategy for multiple-issue negotiation for services between interacting agents (service requestors and service providers). We assume the agents are self-interested. They negotiate over both functionality and QoS (quality of service) issues to reach a service agreement, while maximizing their own utilities. We assume each agent only knows its own negotiation parameters. By combining the merits of issue-by-issue negotiation and package deal negotiation, we propose a coalition deal negotiation to optimize the agents' utilities with minimized computational cost. We prove that the coalition deal makes a better tradeoff between issue-by-issue negotiation and package deal negotiation by providing both approximately optimal utility and efficient computation. In addition, we discuss optimal strategies for service-oriented negotiation in a competitive environment.