A Primitive Study of Logrolling in e-Negotiation

e-Negotiation involves two or more agents multilaterally bargaining for mutual gain, using information technologies in a cooperative problem-solving (CPS) environment. This paper only focuses on integrative negotiations. For example, one party reaches its goals and the other party also gains benefits. One of the strategies for achieving integrative solutions is called logrolling. Logrolling in two-issue two-party negotiation is defined as the exchange of loss in one issue for gain in other issues that result in an increase of the overall value for both parties. Each party can increase the overall value by trading the less preferred issue for the more preferred, provided that a trade-off ratio is satisfactory. Traditionally, the concept of logrolling has only been applied in the trading of votes by legislators. For example, a legislator offers to another to trade his vote on a certain bill in return for the other's votes on other bills. Not much research work about logrolling has been studied in other research areas such as operation research, information systems and electronic commerce. This paper overviews the issues of logrolling in the context of e-Negotiation. In particular, this paper introduces a linear programming model for optimizing trade-off ratios in the context of two-issue two-party logrolling.