Theory and practice of argumentation based-negotiation

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Automated negotiation provides an important foundation for technical services in the information society (pulled by applications like e-commerce and pushed by technologies like web-services and grid computing). Mechanisms in which software agents exchange potential agreements (offers) according to various rules of interaction have become very popular in recent years. These mechanisms try to accommodate the agents' preferences and include: game-theoretic analysis and heuristic-based approaches. A growing body of research is now emerging that points out limitations in such mechanisms and advocates the hypothesis that agents can increase the likelihood and quality of an agreement by exchanging arguments that influence each others' mental states (and thus preferences). This is the idea of argumentation-based approaches to negotiation. While this idea is not completely new, no work has provided evidence of the advantage of argumentation-based negotiation so far.