Negotiation Technologies

摘要

Negotiation is a process by which a group of entities try and come to a mutually acceptable agreement on some matter. Because of its ubiquity in everyday encounters, it is a subject that has been extensively discussed in the game-theoretic, economic, and management science literatures. Recently, however, there has been a surge of interest in automated negotiation systems that are populated with artificial agents (see [1] for more details). This is due to both a technology push and an application pull. The technology push is mainly from a growing standardised communication infrastructure (e.g., the Semantic Web, the Grid and Peer-to-Peer systems) which allows distributed and heterogeneous entities to interact flexibly. The application pull is from domains (e.g., supply chain management, telecommunication network management, virtual organisations and electronic trading systems) that require self-interested software entities, representing different stakeholders, to interact in a flexible manner. In these applications, conflicts often arise because the agents represent perspectives and different preferences. Allied to this, is the fact that the agents act autonomously (i.e., they decide for themselves what actions they should take, at what time, and under what terms and conditions). In such circumstances, the interaction between the agents can only proceed by the process of making proposals and/or trading offers, with the aim of finding a mutually acceptable agreement. In short, by negotiation.