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Overview

The Story: Humans negotiate everything—prices, resources, agreements. As LLM agents act on behalf of users, they need to negotiate too. But how well can they actually do it? The Solution: NegotiationArena - A research platform that tests how well LLMs negotiate with each other through games and scenarios.

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Why This Matters

When agents negotiate:
  • They split tasks among teams
  • They allocate limited resources
  • They resolve conflicts
  • They reach consensus without human intervention
The Research Question: Can GPT-4 negotiate better than GPT-3.5? What strategies do they use? Do they cooperate or compete?

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What NegotiationArena Discovered

“Babysitting” Effect: When a strong model (GPT-4) negotiates with a weaker one (GPT-3.5), GPT-4 often guides the conversation to help the weaker model—but makes worse offers for itself in the process. Reasoning Patterns: By analyzing agent conversations, researchers found LLMs use different negotiation strategies based on their initialization and opponent behavior.

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Use Cases in Bindu

Task Allocation - Agents negotiate who does what in a workflow
Resource Sharing - Agents bid for compute resources or API quotas
Service Agreements - Agents negotiate SLA terms and pricing
Collaborative Planning - Multi-agent teams reach consensus on approach

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Integration Plan

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Phase 1: NegotiationArena Integration

  • Integrate NegotiationArena framework into Bindu
  • Support game-based negotiation scenarios
  • Enable agent-to-agent negotiation via A2A protocol

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Phase 2: Negotiation Protocols

from bindu.negotiation import NegotiationGame

# Create negotiation scenario
game = NegotiationGame(
    scenario="task_allocation",
    agents=[agent_a, agent_b],
    rules={
        "max_rounds": 5,
        "timeout": timedelta(minutes=2)
    }
)

# Run negotiation
result = await game.play()
print(f"Agreement: {result.agreement}")
print(f"Payoffs: {result.payoffs}")

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Phase 3: Evaluation & Analytics

  • Track negotiation success rates
  • Analyze agent strategies
  • Measure win rates and payoffs
  • Export conversation logs for analysis

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Phase 4: Production Features

  • Automatic negotiation for resource allocation
  • Built-in negotiation strategies (cooperative, competitive, adaptive)
  • Agreement enforcement with cryptographic commitments

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Status

📋 Planned - Research integration and protocol design

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What’s Next