The 17th International Automated Negotiating Agent Competition (Submission: May 31, 2026)

[Tim Baarslag]

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Call for participation: The Automated Negotiating Agents Competition 2026

Submission deadline: ~31st May, 2026

Notification of Finalists: 14th June, 2026

To be held at: IJCAI 2026, 15–21 August 2026, Bremen, Germany

Prizes: 5000+ euros for travel scholarships to IJCAI

Website: https://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2026/

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Motivation, impact, and expected outcomes

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We invite researchers to participate in the Automated Negotiating Agent
Competition (ANAC) 2026, which brings together researchers from the
negotiation community and provides a unique benchmark for evaluating
practical negotiation strategies in multi-issue domains. ANAC has the
following aims:

* to provide an incentive for the development of effective negotiation
strategies and protocols for bidding, accepting and opponent modeling for
different negotiation scenarios;

* to collect and develop a benchmark of negotiation scenarios, protocols
and strategies;

* to develop a common set of tools and criteria for the evaluation and
exploration of new protocols and new strategies against benchmark
scenarios, protocols and strategies;

* to set the research agenda for automated negotiation.

The previous competitions have spawned novel research in AI in the field of
autonomous agent design which are available to the wider research
community. This year, we introduce a variety of negotiation research
challenges:

* Explore the strategies and difficulties in creating efficient agents whose primary purpose is to negotiate and deceive. See: https://scml.cs.brown.edu/anl

* Supply Chain Management League: Design and build an autonomous agent that negotiates on behalf of a factory manager situated in a supply chain management simulation. See: https://scml.cs.brown.edu/scml

* Human Agent Negotiation (HAN) League: Design and build a negotiation agent that can negotiate effectively with a human partner.


We expect innovative and novel agent strategies will be developed, and the submitted ANAC 2026 agents will serve as a negotiating agent repository to the negotiation community.

There will be more than 5000 euros of prize money available in the form of travel scholarships for students to attend the ANAC session to be held in conjunction with IJCAI. For being eligible to apply for this scholarship, you should participate in at least one of the leagues and submit your agent on time.

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Website URL

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For more details, please visit the competition webpage:
https://web.tuat.ac.jp/~katfuji/ANAC2026/
More information will be added in the coming weeks.

ANAC Board Members

* Dr. Reyhan Aydogan, Ozyegin University & Delft University of Technology

* Prof. Dr. Tim Baarslag, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) & Eindhoven University of Technology

* Prof. Dr. Katsuhide Fujita, Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

* Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology

League Organizers

* Automated Agents League: Loes Peters (CWI/Eindhoven University) & ANAC Board Members

* Supply Chain Management League: Dr. Yasser Mohammad and Dr. Satoshi Morinaga (NEC, AIST); Prof.Dr. Katsuhide Fujita, (TUAT,NEC-AIST); Prof. Dr. Amy Greenwald (Brown University); Mark Klein (MIT)

Scientific Advisory Board

* Prof. Dr. Catholijn Jonker, Delft University of Technology (Chair)

* Prof. Dr. Takayuki Ito, Nagoya Institute of Technology

* Prof. Dr. Carles Sierra, IIIA/CSIC

* Prof. Dr. Jonathan Gratch, USC