Defeat Among Negotiation Arguments

Recent work by Parsons-Sierra-Jennings and Kraus-Sycara-Evenchik, and others, has put formal representations of argument together with negotiation dialogues. Unfortunately, the analysis has not been as penetrating as perhaps it could be. This is because the authors have been (i) attempting to formalize negotiation speech acts too broadly while (ii) including explicit argument moves in the dialogue which (iii) refer to domain features. Here, we aim to simplify the issues. First, we restrict the ontology to abstract properties of the game. The same basic CBR ideas are rendered using a simple representation of prior negotiations. The advantage is that defeat among arguments referring to precedent settlements can be seen clearly. This gives way to a more complicated Simari-Loui style of argument as we consider the metastrategies for how much each party would like to base negotiation on argumentation. 1 ARGUMENT AND NEGOTIATION The idea that negotiation dialogues contain argumentation subdialogues is prevalent in AI. Sycara and Carberry (with Chu-Carroll and Lambert) are early notable authors on the subject. Recently, Parsons (with Noriega, Sierra, Jennings, Wooldridge, McBurney, and others) and Kraus (with Sycara and Evenchik) have produced papers that have had many followers (e.g., Qiu-Tambe, Rueda-García-Simari, Rahwan-Sonenberg, Koit-Õim, Torroni, Brito-NovaisNeves) . Work by Ferguson (with Allen) represents a bridge between the two, where planning dialogues are “mixed-initiative” and contain explicit arguments. The advent of formal methods for representing arguments makes clear the possibility of formalizing the argument subdialogues within a formal model of negotiation. Much work on argument theorizes about the argument-moves and speech acts appropriate to the dialectical process (e.g., Gordon, Leenes-Lodder-Hage, Verheij). 1 Washington University in St. Louis, USA, loui@cs.wustl.edu. 2,3 Universidad Nacional del Sur, Bahía Blanca, ARGENTINA. Loui suggested that the same could be done for argument in negotiation dialogues in two earlier. Our problem is that the scope of the resulting work has been broad and the ideas diffuse. This is not altogether a bad thing, as the formalization of argument and negotiation may mean many things to many people. However, we believe the picture can be greatly simplified. There can be is such a thing as too much good notation. Instead of trying to define numerous formal protocols that seek to capture the wide variety of speech acts related to persuasion and negotiation, we ask two simple questions: I. What is the minimal economic model upon which meaningful negotiation arguments can be constructed, and what is the dynamics of this small model?