A pareto-efficient and fair mediation approach to multilateral negotiation

In multi-issue negotiations, autonomous agents can act cooperatively to benefit from mutually preferred agreements. However, empirical evidence suggests that autonomous agents often fail to elicit possible joint gains and end up with inefficient results in multi-issue negotiation, especially when it involves multiple parties. In order to address this problem, we propose a mediated negotiation approach to support the agents reaching an efficient and fair agreement in multi-party multi-issue negotiation. The proposed approach improves the agents' utility values from the status quo, by searching for the mutually preferred outcomes that minimizes the difference between the agents' utility gains, leading to fair agreements. We present two case studies to illustrate the capability of the proposed approach in real-world negotiation applications. We also provide an experimental evaluation of the overall performance of our proposed approach. The experimental results demonstrate that out proposed approach does not only guarantee Pareto-efficiency, but also produces outcomes that are close to the fair egalitarian solutions. © 2014-IOS Press.