Multilateral Mediated Negotiation Protocols with Feedback

Much attention has been paid to bilateral negotiation in which the dispute is between only two parties. However, automated multilateral negotiation in which more than two negotiating parties need to reach a joint agreement, has received relatively less attention, even though such negotiations are required in many circumstances (e.g. a group of managers making a joint decision for their company investments, a group of friends planning their holiday together). In such cases, automated negotiation tools can play a key role in providing effective solutions. One of the important issues in designing such negotiation tools, is to decide on the protocol that governs the interaction between parties and determines when the final agreement will be reached. In this paper, we focus on and investigate different mediator-based protocols for multilateral negotiations. We take [3] as a starting point and propose a variant of this protocol.