Protocols for negotiating complex contracts

Research to date on negotiation protocols has focused almost exclusively on defining simple contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and a relatively small number of possible contracts. Many real-world contracts, in contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple interdependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. The family of negotiation protocols we´ve developed make substantial progress toward achieving near-optimal outcomes for negotiations with binary issue dependencies. We propose a simulated annealing-based approach, a refined version based on a parity-maintaining annealing mediator, and an unmediated version of the negotiation protocol.