We show how a system of artificial adaptive agents, using a genetic algorithm based learning technique, can learn strategies that enable it to effectively participate in stylized business negotiations. The negotiation policies learned are evaluated on several dimensions, including joint outcomes, nearness to the efficient frontier, and the similarity to outcomes of human negotiations. The resul...

eCommerce of the Business-to-Business (B2B) type requires comprehensive contract negotiations depending entirely on a contract schema, which must be developed in advance. Contract sche-mas are modeled according to bill-of-materials. Undefined contract parts are not allowed (Closed World Assumption). In the focus of the discussions are implications, i.e. the contract parts are not independent of...

Developing countries have both offensive and defensive interests in the Doha Round of WTO trade negotiations. This paper discusses the extent to which these interests have been addressed in the July 2004 Framework Agreement and in the subsequent negotiations. Many of the key demands of developing countries appear to have been accepted in principle in the Agreement, but the lack of specific deta...

[no abstract available]

This paper analyses GATT/WTO trade negotiations in an oligopolistic multicountry setting and identifies a new rationale for trade agreements. When set unilaterally, tariffs are inefficiently high, both for familiar terms-of-trade reasons, but also to restrict market access of foreign firms. Trade agreements neutralise both the terms-of-trade and the market-access externalities and help countrie...

Negotiations are an important activity for engineering managers, but they have received little research or educational attention. An educational simulation game of negotiations in a typical civil engineering context is described in this paper. Experience with the game demonstrates that negotiating skills can be improved. Agreements reached by participants in the game are often inferior in the s...

We develop CONAN, a heuristic agent for concurrent bilateral negotiations in electronic markets that are open, dynamic and complex. Existing strategies often omit the factors determining when a market environment is open or how an agent evaluates progress in bilateral negotiations. Such omissions in turn damage the offer-making ability of an agent and consequently the number of successful negot...

Buyers always want to obtain goods at the lowest price. To do so, a buyer agent can have multiple concurrent negotiations with all the sellers. It is obvious that if the buyer obtains a good price from one of the sellers, the buyer should have more bargaining power in negotiating with other sellers. Then, other sellers should offer a lower price in order to make a deal. In this way, the concurr...

3. In the fifty years preceding the Doha ministerial conference, there have been eight rounds of negotiations. After the establishment of the GATT in 1948, there were six rounds of tariff-cutting negotiations. This was followed by the first successful attack on non-tariff barriers in the Tokyo Round negotiations, launched in 1973, and in 1993, by the completion of the Uruguay Round, launched in...

of Thesis Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Master of Science AUTOMATED NEGOTIATIONS IN O.C.E.A.N By Chaitanya Chokkareddy August 2002 Chair: Dr. Michael P. Frank Department: Computer and Information Science and Engineering The automation of negotiations is a real challenge in the world of e-business. The problem ste...