Automated Negotiation from Declarative Contract Descriptions

Our approach for automating the negotiation of business contracts proceeds in three broad steps. First, determine the structure of the negotiation process by applying general knowledge about auctions and domain–specific knowledge about the contract subject along with preferences from potential buyers and sellers. Second, translate the determined negotiation structure into an operational specification for an auction platform. Third, after the negotiation has completed, map the negotiation results to a final contract. We have implemented a prototype which supports these steps by employing a declarative specification (in courteous logic programs) of (1) high–level knowledge about alternative negotiation structures, (2) general–case rules about auction parameters, (3) rules to map the auction parameters to a specific auction platform, and (4) special–case rules for subject domains. We demonstrate the flexibility of this approach by automatically generating several alternative negotiation structures for the domain of travel shopping in a trading agent competition.

[1]  Arne Andersson,et al.  Integer programming for combinatorial auction winner determination , 2000, Proceedings Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems.

[2]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  The Michigan Internet AuctionBot: a configurable auction server for human and software agents , 1998, AGENTS '98.

[3]  Manoj Kumar,et al.  Internet Auctions , 1998, USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce.

[4]  A. Roth,et al.  Last-Minute Bidding and the Rules for Ending Second-Price Auctions: Evidence from eBay and Amazon Auctions on the Internet , 2002 .

[5]  F. Branco The Design of Multidimensional Auctions , 1997 .

[6]  M. Bichler The Future of e-Markets: Multidimensional Market Mechanisms , 2001 .

[7]  John Rust,et al.  The Double Auction Market , 1989 .

[8]  Benjamin N. Grosof Prioritized Conflict Handling for Logic Programs , 1997, ILPS.

[9]  Benjamin N. Grosof,et al.  A declarative approach to business rules in contracts: courteous logic programs in XML , 2015, EC '99.

[10]  Chitta Baral,et al.  Logic Programming and Knowledge Representation , 1994, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[11]  Noam Nisan,et al.  Bidding and allocation in combinatorial auctions , 2000, EC '00.

[12]  Asit Dan,et al.  The Coyote Project: Framework for Multi-party E-Commerce , 1998, ECDL.

[13]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  The 2001 trading agent competition , 2002, Electron. Mark..

[14]  Craig Milo Rogers,et al.  Controlling Supplier Selection in an Automated Purchasing System , 1999 .

[15]  Michael P. Wellman,et al.  A Parametrization of the Auction Design Space , 2001, Games Econ. Behav..

[16]  Paul R. Milgrom,et al.  Putting Auction Theory to Work: The Simultaneous Ascending Auction , 1999, Journal of Political Economy.

[17]  Shou-De Lin,et al.  Designing the Market Game for a Trading Agent Competition , 2001, IEEE Internet Comput..

[18]  Tuomas Sandholm,et al.  Algorithm for optimal winner determination in combinatorial auctions , 2002, Artif. Intell..

[19]  Sven de Vries,et al.  Combinatorial Auctions: A Survey , 2003, INFORMS J. Comput..

[20]  Manoj Kumar,et al.  A platform for business-to-business sell-side, private exchanges and marketplaces , 2002, IBM Syst. J..

[21]  Victoria Ungureanu,et al.  A mechanism for establishing policies for electronic commerce , 1998, Proceedings. 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (Cat. No.98CB36183).