In this chapter we present an application and a framework aiming
at the automation of bilateral negotiation on multiple issue in e-markets. We
address several challenges of a typical negotiation in an online marketplace,
such as (i) how to elicit preferences from users; (ii) how to formally
represent preferences that at the same time allow human users to express both
qualitative and quantitative preferences; (iii) how to compute agreements
which are mutual beneficial for both buyer and seller, i.e., outcome enjoying
economics properties as Pareto-efficiency. The issue of preference elicitation
is addressed with the help of an easy-to-use graphical interface hiding all the
technicalities of the underlying framework. Preferences are then mapped to
a logic language, that allows one to express preferences on both numerical
and non-numerical features. We build a utility function on top of this logic
language in order to permit the representation of relative importance among
preferences, to evaluate the possible agreements and finally choose the one(s)
enjoying the Pareto-efficiency property.
Keywords: Logic-based Negotiation, Weighted Formulas, Bilateral
Negotiation, Pareto Efficiency, Multi-attribute Negotiation, Ontologies,
Constrained Preferences, Quantitative Preferences, E-markets, Preference
Elicitation.
