Conditional Preference Networks Support Multi-issue Negotiations with Mediator

Conflicts of interest occur in various aspects of our daily life and we often come to an understanding by negotiating our way through these conflicts. This paper presents a simple interactive negotiation approach to resolve certain conflicts that involve multiple issues. The focus is on mediation to facilitate a solution based on alternating offers over a finite-time bargaining game. The mediator explores the possibilities and proposes a jointly optimal negotiation text for all the players participating in the negotiation process, based on their conditional preference networks (CP-nets). Each individual player then makes a decision to accept or reject the proposal based on their utility CP-nets. If any player rejects, the mediator offers another negotiation text and the process goes on until an agreement is achieved or some time limit is reached. Two algorithms are developed with regard to the players as well as the mediator, and a daily-life situation is investigated based on them. A historically important negotiation event has also been investigated using this model.