Argument-based negotiation in a social context

Argumentation-based negotiation (ABN) provides agents with an effective means to resolve conflicts within a multi-agent society. However, to engage in such argumentative encounters the agents require the ability to generate arguments, which, in turn, demands four fundamental capabilities: a schema to reason in a social context, a mechanism to identify a suitable set of arguments, a language and a protocol to exchange these arguments, and a decision making functionality to generate such dialogues. This paper focuses on the first two issues and formulates models to capture them. Specifically, we propose a coherent schema, based on social commitments, to capture social influences emanating from the roles and relationships of a multi-agent society. After explaining how agents can use this schema to reason within a society, we then use it to identify two major ways of exploiting social influence within ABN to resolve conflicts. The first of these allows agents to argue about the vali...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Nishan C. Karunatillake, Nicholas R. Jennings, Iyad Rahwan, Timothy J. Norman
• Keywords: ATAL 2005, Multi-agent Society, Social, Social Influences