A Proposed Approach to Sophisticated Negotiation

This paper proposes an approach to attack the multi-linked negotiation in a complex organizational context. The motivational qualities (MQ) framework developed earlier, provides the agent with the capability to reason about different objective goals hence the agent can evaluate a negotiation issue via its organizational objectives. The partial order schedule is exploited as a reasoning tool for the agent to handle the concurrent multiple linked negotiation issues and evaluate the flexibility and the feasibility in the negotiation. We propose that negotiation should be performed at different abstraction levels, rough commitments are formed at the upper level and then refined at the lower level to solve potential conflicts among different negotiation issues. Also, we bring multiple issues into the negotiation process such as the temporal scope of the commitment, the cost of the commitment and the flexibility of the commitment. The agents are negotiating over multiple issues rather than over a single issue.