Family Winner: Integrating Game Theory and Heuristics to Provide Negotiation Support

Negotiation, is in general very context sensitive. Since our research laboratory has successfully developed decision support systems in Australian Family Law, we have used our domain expertise to construct a variety of Family Law negotiation support systems. Family Winner uses a variety of artificial intelligence and game theoretic techniques to advise upon structuring the mediation process and advising disputants upon possible trade-offs. Heuristic utility functions were developed from cases supplied to us by he Australian Institute of Family Studies. Family Winner operates best when it is possible to allocate points to issues, and creative decision-making is not required. Whilst conducting an evaluation of the Family Winner system, we observed that Family Winner, in focusing upon providing advice with regard to bargaining, had neglected considering issues of justice. In a domain such as Family Law, issues of justice are of paramount concern. This indicates that use of negotiation support systems should be limited to domains in which principles of equity do not conflict with user satisfaction. When Family Winner was used in a variety of other negotiation domains (international disputes, enterprise bargaining and company mergers) the advice offered strongly resembled the eventual negotiated outcome.