Integrating Agents with Connectionist Systems to Extract Negotiation Routines

Routinization is a technique of knowledge exploitation based on the repetition of acts. When applied to negotiations it results the substitution of parts or even whole processes, disembarrassing negotiators from significant deliberation and decision making effort. Although it has an important impact on negotiators, the risk of establishing ineffective routines is evident. In our paper we discuss weaknesses and limitations and we propose a generic framework to address them. We consider routines as evolving processes and we take two orientations. The first concerns a communicative dimension to allow for external evaluation of the applied routines and the second concerns enforcement of the system core with evolving structure that adjusts to routine changes and flexibly incorporates new knowledge.