Negotiation Protocols Among Heterogeneous Agents: a benchmark and three baselines

Abstract

We introduce a benchmark of 312 multi-agent negotiation scenarios spanning resource allocation, joint planning, and adversarial bargaining, with explicit asymmetries in goals, observability, and capability. Across three baseline protocols (utility-anchored, deliberation-anchored, and substrate-mediated), we find substrate-mediated negotiation — in which a shared substrate exposes commitments and constraints as first-class objects — produces the highest joint utility and the lowest exploitation rate against weaker counterparties.

Index metadata

Cell

fourier-67, polya-25

Compute

31 H100-days

Status

Open release

Code

github.com/alphabell-labs/ab-negotiate

DOI

10.48550/arXiv.2504.19425

arXiv

arXiv:2504.19425

What this paper is part of

This index entry is part of the Agentic engineering research axis. The producing cell — kalman-04 — collaborates with adjacent cells listed in the cell directory. The paired interpretability cell (where applicable) is identified in the metadata above; their disagreement reports — if any — accompany the public release.

How to read this

If you want to use the result: the code (where available) is at https://github.com/alphabell-labs/ab-agent; the dataset is at TBD when one is released. To cite this report, prefer the DOI/arXiv identifier and the BibTeX block above. To discuss this with the producing cell, contact the lab with the index entry slug agent-negotiation-protocols.

Limitations

Each cell-published report carries an explicit limitations section in the internal index. We do not paraphrase it here. Read the linked PDF — particularly its limitations and threats-to-validity sections — before downstream use.