An Empirical Evaluation of Multidimensional Matchmaking

An electronic negotiation is a request-and-offer based communication process between agents in a market aiming at an agreement for a mutual consent deal. The process breaks in several phases, one of which is matchmaking. Matchmaking includes the determination of the relevance of a specific offer for a request. This process is used (i) to find out which offering agents do fit the request best; and (ii) to incrementally evaluate the relevance of modified offers in negotiation rounds. Multidimensional matchmaking describes offer and request structures which consist of many attributes clustered along multiple dimensions. The business logic applied in the matchmaking process is also structured along these dimension. In this work the matchmaking architecture GRAPPA (Generic Request Architecture for Passive Provider Agents) is presented and evalutated in the human resources domain. The evaluation results are derived by comparing GRAPPA matchmaking results with the rankings of (i) a set of human experts; and (ii) a commercial search engine, the Microsoft Index Server.