Negotiation: Settling Conflicts and Identifying Opportunities
Papers from the AAAI Workshop
Sandip Sen, Chair
Technical Report WS-99-12
66 pp., $25.00
ISBN 978-1-57735-096-5
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Agents interact with other agents in their environment in a variety of circumstances. Multiple agents in such shared environments have to trade off goals with others because of resource constraints and goal conflicts. On the other hand, agents can engage in fruitful dialogue by which they can unearth new possibilities and form new productive partnerships. Negotiation is a process by which agents interactively settle on mutually agreeable behaviors to serve common purpose. Agents negotiate under a variety of information, time, and computational restrictions. A key research issue in agents and multiagent research is to develop negotiation procedures by which agents can efficiently and effectively negotiate solutions. Effectiveness requires that the outcome is fair, acceptable, or desirable to the parties involved in the negotiation process. Efficiency requires that the procedure is not excessively time-consuming or computing-intensive.
Topics of this workshop included negotiation framework, languages, and protocols; characterizing negotiation schemes in terms of modeling power, communication abilities, knowledge requirement, processing abilities of agents; negotiating to form, maintain, and reorganize teams or coalitions; negotiation roles of agents; agents that facilitate the negotiation process; negotiation in open markets and auctions; specific applications demonstrating agents negotiating in real environments; and learning to negotiate.