Optimal agendas for multi-issue negotiation

There are two ways of handling bilateral multi-issue negotiations – one is to negotiate all the issues together, and the other is to negotiate them one by one. The order in which issues are negotiated in issue-by-issue negotiation is specified by the agenda, which can be defined in two ways. One way is to decide it exogenously, i.e., before negotiation begins. The other way is to let the players decide which issue they will negotiate next, during the process of negotiation, i.e., the agenda is determined endogenously. Against this background, this paper studies the effect of combining the exogenous and endogenous agendas on the players’ utilities. More specifically, we determine whether, decomposing a set of Æ issues into stages (for ½ Æ), determining the issues to be negotiated at each stage exogenously, and negotiating each stage sequentially using an endogenous agenda can improve an agent’s utility relative to the utility it gets if the agenda for all the Æ issues is d...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: S. Shaheen Fatima, Michael Wooldridge, Nicholas R. Jennings
• Keywords: ATAL 2003, Endogenous Agenda, Negotiation, Negotiation Scenarios