Defining metaphor-based negotiation

The AI research topics in negotiation can be distinguished into three major categories: AI-based negotiation support system (NSS), game-theory-based negotiation and metaphor-based negotiation. This paper focuses on metaphor-based negotiation by which I mean a category of distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) problem-solving approaches (or computational models) that mimic human negotiation processes in some aspects. Although there has been a resurgence of interest in metaphor-based negotiation, an issue is still been questioned by us: what is negotiation. So far, there has been no formalized definition found. This paper is therefore aimed at bringing this issue into discussion. Taking a deliberately designed scenario-cake-sharing as an example, a formalized definition of negotiation is given and a formalism of modelling metaphor-based negotiation is presented finally. In the definition, the emphasis is on the content of information that will be exchanged during negotiation. The content consists of an agreement and an explanation which are produced according to agent´s complete knowledge about itself and incomplete knowledge about others. The formalism based on this definition is given, which provided a more specific view about how metaphor-based negotiation is modelled according to the definition