How individuals negotiate societies

The author proposes a formal model of coordination in multi-agent systems. Wooldridge and Jennings (1996) restrict their approach to cooperative problem solving cases insisting in a team-formation stage in which agents commit themselves to act as a group to achieve a common goal before negotiation starts. In his model, autonomous agents first recognise how they depend on each other (they may need or prefer to interact about the same or different goals), and then, in the negotiation phase, exchange offers in the form of commissive speech acts. Finally, agents adopt social, interlocking, commitments if an agreement is reached. Joint plans are seen as deals and team activity as a special case of social activity. The main contributions of the work are: (a) social pre-conventions are not needed; (b) the outcome of the coordination process can achieve agents´ goals only partially; (c) social notions are defined as the conjunction of their individual counterparts