To participate, you need to follow the following steps:

1. Drop by the ANAC booth anytime between 9am and 12am or 2pm and 5pm to register an account (best during coffee breaks). You can also register an account online here
2. After registration, you will be able to log into the system and start negotiating using the Human Agent Negotiation Interface.

This year's competition will use a simple bargaining (Alternating Offers) protocol. When you start a negotiation, the AI agent will present you with their offer. You can either (1) accept it, ending the negotiation with success receiving your utility for the offer which is now the agreement. (2) end the negotiation in failure receiving the reserved value. (3) reject the offer and send a counteroffer, continuing the negotiation. The AI agent will then have the same 3 options. This process continues until either (1) you or the AI agent accept an offer, or (2) you or the AI agent end the negotiation, or (3) 5 minutes have passed without agreement, (4) more than 100 offers have been exchanged without agreement. In the last two cases, the negotiation ends with failure and you received your reserved value.

We provide some resources to help you understand the negotiation interface and be ready to participate in the competition:

1. This video describes how to use the interface.
2. If you prefer text, a brief explanation of the negotiation system can be found here.

You must be 18 years or older to participate in this condition, Furthermore, you must satisfy the following conditions to be considered for the official competition and the monetary prize

1. You must agree to the consent form during registration (here).
2. You must fill the Pre-Competition-Questionnaire before conducting any negotiations, and the Post-Competition-Questionnaire after conducting all negotiations.
3. There are three different negotiation scenario types in HAN 2025 (Grocery, Island and Simple Trade). You need to log at least two negotiations on each scenario.

When calculating the score of each participant we will follow the following procedure:

1. The lowest score on each scenario type will always be discarded.
2. If you record more than 4 negotiations on any scenario type, all scores other than your top 3 will be discarded.
3. For each scenario type, the average score on negotiations that were not discarded will be calculated as the scenario type score.
4. Your final score is the average of scenario type scores. This final score is guaranteed to be a number between zero and one.
5. Discarded scores (except the lowest per participant) may be used for tie-breaking if two participants have almost the same final score (i.e. up to two significant digits).

The winners are the participants with maximum final scores. The organizers will decide the number of winners based on the number of participants and score distribution but it will not exceed three winners. A prize pool of up to 1000USD will be divided between the winners.

The winners will be contacted after the conference to arrange the transfer of their prizes. This process may require some time to finalize.

ANAC runs every year with different challenges. Keep an eye on this website for future competitions. If you are interested in developing automated negotiating agents to negotiate with people or other agents using structured protocols or natural language, you are in the right place.

To receive updates and to prepare for participating in future ANAC competitions, please register.

You can find more about automated negotiation and the NegMAS platform underlying the competition here (This is strictly optinoal. You do not need any of this for the HAN competition.):

1. For a simple introduction to the automated negotiation field check this tutorial
2. For more information about developing automated negotiating agents, you can check NegMAS Documentation
3. If you prefer a book check this recently published open-source book.