Leveled Commitment and Trust in Negotiation

As agents become more autonomous, agent negotiation and motivational attitudes such as commitment and trust become more important. In this paper we consider the important choice in advanced negotiation applications whether negotiation parameters – such as cardinality of interaction, agent attitude, and agent architectures – are incorporated in the negotiation protocol or in the negotiation strategy. Only in the first case parameters are fixed and agents do not have to reason about them when they choose their strategy. We define a dynamic deontic logic which can also be used for the second case, because it models concepts like leveled commitment and trust. For example, it formalizes that violating commitments leads to a decrease in trustworthiness.