Mediated Heuristic Approaches and Alternative Social Welfare Definitions for Complex Contract Negotiations Involving Highly Uncorrelated Utility Spaces

Automated negotiation provides an important mechanism to reach agreements among distributed decision makers (Beer et al., 1999; Kraus et al., 1998; Lai et al., 2004; Rosenschein & Zlotkin, 1994). It has been extensively studied from the perspective of e-commerce (Guttman et al., 1998; He et al., 2003; Lopez-Carmona et al., 2006; Sierra, 2004), though it can be seen from a more general perspective as a paradigm to solve coordination and cooperation problems in complex systems (Jennings, 2001; Klein et al., 2002), providing a mechanism for autonomous agents to reach agreements on, e.g., task allocation, resource sharing, or surplus division (Fatima et al., 2004; Kersten & Noronha, 1998; Zhang et al., 2005).