A distributed multiobjective approach to negotiations in semi-competitive environments

Realistic negotiation settings in socio-economic contexts are distributed multi-attribute scenarios in which negotiators act largely selfishly but make concessions in the interests of long-term gains. These semi-competitive environments have increasingly complex goal structures in which a single negotiator has difficulty identifying his own ideal goals. In combination with the conflicting goals of other parties to the negotiations, the situation presents itself as a complex multi-objective scenario with incomplete information. Most existing approaches to this problem either assume linear or monotonic functions or they employ an unbiased mediator to select a single proposal as the basis of an agreement. Existing approaches also assume that each negotiating party can identify her own acceptance limit or reservation utility. The current work overcomes these limitations by introducing a distributed approach which integrates another party's proposals into the local optimisation process. It employs a dynamic coceding strategy which is not dependent on the identification of a reservation utility.