TABLE OF CONTENTS Tibor Bosse, Catholijn M. Jonker, Lourens van der Meij, Valentin Robu and Jan Treur
Abstract. This paper presents a System for Analysis of Multi-Issue Negotiation (SAMIN). The agents in this system conduct one-to-one negotiations, in which the values across multiple issues are negotiated on simultaneously. It is demonstrated how the system supports both automated negotiation (i.e., conducted by a software agent) and human negotiation (where humans specify their bids). To analyse such negotiation processes, the user can enter any formal property deemed useful into the system and use the system to automatically check this property in given negotiation traces. Furthermore, it is shown how, compared to fully closed negotiation, the efficiency of the reached agreements may be improved, either by using incomplete preference information revealed by the negotiation partner or by incorporating a heuristic, through which an agent uses the history of the opponent's bids in order to guess his preferences.
Negotiation is a process by which a joint decision is made by two or more parties [9]. Typically each party starts a negotiation by offering the most preferred solution from the individual area of interest. If an offer is not acceptable by the other parties they make counter-offers in order to move them closer to an agreement. The field of negotiation can be split into different categories, e.g. along the following lines:
one-to-one versus more than two parties
single- versus multi-issues
closed versus open
mediator-based versus mediator-free
The research...
