The complexity of contract negotiation

The use of software agents for automatic contract negotiation in e-commerce and e-trading ents has been the subject of considerable recent interest. A widely studied abstract model considers the setting in which a set of agents have some collection of resources shared out between them and attempt to construct a mutually beneficial optimal reallocation of these by trading resources. The simplest such trades are those in which a single agent transfers exactly one resource to another--so-called `one-resource-at-a-time' or `O-contracts'. In this research note we consider the computational complexity of a number of natural decision problems in this setting. 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2005
• Where: AI
• Authors: Paul E. Dunne, Michael Wooldridge, Michael Laurence
• Keywords: AI 2005, Artificial Intelligence, Automatic Contract Negotiation, Beneficial Optimal Reallocation, Software Agents