Experiments in Human Multi - Issue Negotiation : Analysis and Support ( extended

Negotiation is a process by which a joint decision is made by two or more parties [1]. Typically one of the parties starts a negotiation by offering the most preferred solution from the individual area of interest. If an offer is not acceptable to the other parties they make counter-offers in order to move them closer to an agreement. Multi-issue negotiation (also called multi-attribute negotiation) is often seen as a more cooperative form of negotiation than single-issue negotiation, since often an outcome exists that brings joint gains for both parties, see [2]. The first purpose of this paper is to present a System for Analysis of Multi-Issue Negotiation (SAMIN). SAMIN is designed to analyse negotiation processes between human negotiators, between human and software agents, and between software agents. Basically, the system needs three different inputs: (1) a negotiation trace (or a set of traces) (2) a set of dynamic properties that are considered relevant for the negotiation process (3) the negotiation profiles of the participants A trace is a sequence of bids by the negotiators. A dynamic property is an (informal, semi-formal or formal) expression that can or cannot hold for a certain trace. An example of a simple dynamic property is bid-alternation, i.e., after communicating a bid to another agent, the agent remains silent