Toward open negotiation

This article describes an approach to automated negotiation that agents can use in any marketplace, regardless of the negotiation mechanism in use. Because it expresses negotiation mechanisms via shared ontologies rather than hard-coding in participating agents, this approach is particularly suitable for open and dynamic environments, such as the Internet, in which the choice of negotiation protocol is subject to change. The authors address the problem of determining which negotiation strategies to use for a given mechanism by introducing an expert system to reason about bidding strategies according to the negotiation mechanism´s declarative description.