Discovering negotiation knowledge for a probabilistic negotiation Web service in e-Business

Negotiation has long been identified as one of the key processes in e-Business. Classical negotiation models have limited use in e-Business because these models often assume that complete information about the negotiation spaces is available and the computational efficiency is negligible. This paper proposes a practical negotiation system which is developed based on Bayesian learning and engineered as a Web service. The knowledge acquisition bottle-neck presented in previous Bayesian negotiation approaches is resolved by a novel method of inducing domain knowledge based on negotiation history. Our preliminary experiment shows that the proposed probabilistic negotiation method is more effective than a non-learning negotiation model and the extra computational time incurs in the probabilistic model is negligible. © 2004 IEEE.