Advanced Contract Types for Automated Negotiation

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A growing standardized communications infrastucture, over which, agents belonging to different organizations can interact, is expected to raise the importance of automated negotiation among self-interested automated agents. This project investigates normative negotiation stratagies for agents, specifically: a) extending work on single contracts by investigating decommitments, penalties, etc. and their relationships to optimality; b) designing barganing protocals that lead to optimal contracts, and c) studying sequences of contracts among multiple agents, including the affects of changing the pace of decommitments, contingancy contracts, and more powerful contract types that reduce needs for backtracking. The results of these studies will be used to design a normative hybrid multi-agent search algorithm that repesents the best chice in a space of protocals where each dimension corresponds to a methodilogical tradeoff. Among other things, this work is expected to impact electronic commerce, including such aspects as the formation of dynamic alliances of small agile enterprises through dynamic automated contracting. http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~sandholm