Description:
Our approach for automating the negotiation of business
contracts proceeds in three broad steps. First, determine
the structure of the negotiation process by applying general
knowledge about auctions and domain-specific knowledge
about the contract subject along with preferences from po-
tential buyers and sellers. Second, translate the determined
negotiation structure into an operational specication for
an auction platform. Third, map the negotiation results to
a nal contract. We have implemented a prototype which
supports these steps, employing a declarative specication
(in Courteous Logic Programs) of (1) high-level knowledge
about alternative negotiation structures, (2) general-case
rules about auction parameters, (3) rules to map the auction
parameters to a specic auction platform, and (4) special-
case rules for subject domains. We demonstrate the exi-
bility of this approach by automatically generating several
alternative negotiation structures for a previous domain:
travel-shopping in a trading agent competitio