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Arguing over Goals for Negotiation:
Adopting an Assumption-Based
Argumentation Decision Support System
Maxime Morge
Université Lille 1
France
1. Introduction
Negotiations occur in procurement, commerce, health and government, among
organisations (companies and institutions) and individuals. For instance, electronic
procurement (respectively electronic commerce) consists of business-to-business (respectively
business-to-customer) purchase and provision of resources or services through the Internet.
Typically, organisations and individuals invite bids and negotiate costs, volume discounts or
special offers. These negotiations can be (at least partially) delegated to software components
in order to reach agreements (semi-)automatically (Jennings et al., 2001). For this purpose,
software agents must be associated with stakeholders in negotiations.
In negotiations, participation is voluntary and there is no third party imposing a resolution
of conflicts. Participants resolve their conflict by verbal means. The aim for all parties
is to “make a deal” while bargaining over their interests, typically seeking to maximise
their “good” (welfare), and prepared to concede some aspects while insisting on others.
Each side tries to figure out what other sides may want most, or may feel is most
important. Since real-world negotiations can be resolved by confronting and evaluating
the justifications of different positions, argumentation can support such a process. Logical
models of argument (Chesñevar et al., 2000) can be used to support rational decision
making by agents, to guide and empower negotiation amongst stakeholders and allow
them to reach agreements. With the support of argumentation processes, agents decide
which agreements can be acceptable to fulfil the requirements of users and the constraints
imposed by interlocutors, taking into account their expertises/preferences and the utilities
they assign to situations. This is the reason why many works in the area of Artificial
Intelligence focus on computational models of argumentation-based negotiation (Rahwan
et al., 2003). Logical models of arguments (e.g. Amgoud & Prade (2009); Bench-Capon
& Prakken (2006); Kakas & Moraitis (2003)) can be used to encompass the reasoning of
agents engaged in negotiations. However, these approaches do not come with a mechanism
allowing interacting agents to concede. Since agents can consider multiple goals which
may not be fulfilled all together by a set of non-conflicting decisions, e.g. a negotiation
agreement, high-ranked goals must be preferred to low-ranked goals on which agents can
concede. In this paper we propose an argumentation-based mechanism for decision-making
to concede. Adopting the assumption-based approach of argumentation, we propose here
an argumentation framework.
It is built upon a logic language which holds statements
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