Automated Negotiation from Declarative Contract Descriptions

Benjamin Grosof, Daniel Reeves and Michael Wellman

No 4188-01, Working papers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Sloan School of Management

Abstract: Our approach for automating the negotiation of business contracts proceeds in three broad steps. First, determine the structure of the negotiation process by applying general knowledge about auctions and domain-specific knowledge about the contract subject along with preferences from po- tential buyers and sellers. Second, translate the determined negotiation structure into an operational specication for an auction platform. Third, map the negotiation results to a nal contract. We have implemented a prototype which supports these steps, employing a declarative specication (in Courteous Logic Programs) of (1) high-level knowledge about alternative negotiation structures, (2) general-case rules about auction parameters, (3) rules to map the auction parameters to a specic auction platform, and (4) special- case rules for subject domains. We demonstrate the exi- bility of this approach by automatically generating several alternative negotiation structures for a previous domain: travel-shopping in a trading agent competitio

Keywords: Negotiations; Contracts; Auctions; Domain-specific knowledge (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2002-10-23
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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