Representing the negotiation process with a rule-based formalism

The objective of this paper is to introduce a flexible approach to the structuring of negotiations. The process of negotiations with its intricacies is discussed, and drawbacks of quantitative methods are analyzed. The decomposition of the negotiation process into a certain hierarchical structure is presented. This structure is represented with ‘and/or’ trees used for knowledge representation in artificial intelligence. The definitions of flexibility and reactions to the opponent's moves are introduced with the help of a rule-based formalism. The implications of these definitions for the analysis of the negotiation process are presented. The approach is illustrated with a set of hypothetical examples.