Formal accounts of negotiation tend to invoke the strategic models of conflict which have been impressively developed by game theorists in this half-century. For two decades, however, research on artificial intelligence (AI) has produced a different formal picture of the agent and of the rational deliberations of agents. AI's models are not based simply on intensities of preference and quantiti...

How can collective decisions be made among individuals with conflicting preferences or judgments? Arrow’s impossibility theorem and other social-choice-theoretic results suggest that, for many collective decision problems, there are no attractive democratic solutions. In response, deliberative democrats argue that group deliberation makes collective decisions more tractable. How can deliberatio...

In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical. In such circumstances, one would like to have a general way of discovering socially preferable...

Recently, increasing attention has been given to the problem of how to produce goal-directed behaviour in the real world. The approaches taken vary along a spectrum from trying to extend the scope of classical planning techniques in systems such as Cassandra (Pryor & Collins 1996) and BURIDAN (Kushmerick, Hanks, Weld 1995); via including execution in plan construction systems such as Sage (Knob...

Cooperation in multi-agent systems essentially hinges on appropriate communication. This paper shows how to model communication in teamwork within TeamLog, the first multi-modal framework wholly capturing a methodology for working together. Starting from the dialogue theory of Walton and Krabbe, the paper focuses on deliberation, the main type of dialogue during team planning. We provide a sche...