Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
deal that influence preferences. For example, the location of the company that you are
applying to work for can be very important, because it determines the duration of your
daily commute, but it is hardly negotiable. Still, such properties are important in negoti-
ation. If, for example, you already got an offer from another company near your home,
you will only consider offers that are better taking the location into account.
A
possible outcome
or possible deal has a specified value for every issue. All bids
made during a negotiation are possible outcomes. For example, a possible outcome
could be a job contract for the position of programmer, with a salary of
3000 gross per
month, with 25 holidays, for the duration of one year with the possibility of extension.
Any other assignment to the issues would constitute a different outcome. It is the user's
preferences over such possible outcomes that we are interested in.
With
criteria
we mean the features on which a preference between outcomes is
based. It is common to base preferences directly on the negotiated issues; in that case
the issues are the criteria. In this paper we argue that not issues, but underlying interests
should be used as criteria.
Many terms are used for what we consider to be
underlying interests
, such as fun-
damental objectives, values, concerns, goals and desires. In our view, an interest can
be any kind of motivation that leads to a preference. Essentially, a preference depends
on how well your interests are met in the outcomes to be compared. The degree to
which interests are met is influenced by the issues, but there is not necessarily a one-
to-one relation between issues and interests. For example, an applicant with childcare
responsibilities will have the interest that the children are taken care of after school.
This interest can be met by various different issues, for example part-time work, the
possibility to work from home, a salary that will cover childcare expenses, etc. One
issue may also contribute to multiple interests. Many issues that deal with money do so,
because the interests different people have for using the money will be diverse.
e
3
Related Work
Existing literature about preferences is abundant and very diverse. In this section we
briefly discuss the approaches that are most closely related to our interests.
Interest-based negotiation
is discussed in [4]. However, this approach has a particular
view on negotiation as an allocation of indivisible and non-sharable resources. The
resources are needed to carry out plans to reach certain goals. Even though the goals
can be seen as underlying interests, it is hard to model e.g. negotiation about a job
contract as an allocation of resources. Salary might be an allocation of money, but other
issues, like position or start date, cannot be translated as easily into resources.
Argumentation about preferences has been studied extensively in the context of
de-
cision making
[5,6,7,8]. The aim of decision making is to choose an action to perform.
The quality of an action is determined by how well its consequences satisfy certain
criteria. For example, [5] present an approach in which arguments of various strengths
in favour of and against a decision are compared. However, it is a two-step process in
which argumentation is used only for epistemic reasoning. In our approach, we combine
reasoning about preferences and knowledge in a single argumentation framework.
