Contract clause negotiation by game theory

ABSTRACT

Several recent investigations in Artificial Intelligence and Law have dealt with the problem of "contract clause negotiation", often seen as a specific type of "meaning negotiation". Though a consistent effort has been spent in modelling situations in which two agents mediate the rules to govern a cooperation stipulated in a contract, there is still a lack of formalisation for such a task from a logical viewpoint, and specifically, no model exists, to the best of our knowledge, in the current literature, that represents the negotiation process directly using techniques of the Theory of zero-sum Games, although the majority of scholars admit that the behaviour of agents negotiating in contract definition are quite well modelled by that approach. In particular, we propose to model peer-to-peer meaning negotiation process by a zerosum game, known in Game Theory literature as Bargaining. This approach shows its usefulness in the development of a methodology for obtaining shared theories from distinct ones, and we apply it directly in a framework in which it is possible to represent Contract Clause Negotiation processes.

REFERENCES

• 1: Katie Atkinson , Trevor Bench-Capon , Peter McBurney, Arguing about cases as practical reasoning, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, June 06-11, 2005, Bologna, Italy [doi>10.1145/1165485.1165492]
• 2: Samuel Meira Brasil , Berilhes Borges Garcia, Modelling legal reasoning in a mathematical environment through model theoretic semantics, Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, June 24-28, 2003, Scotland, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1047788.1047833]
• 3: Chin-Liang Chang , Richard C. Lee , Richard Char-Tung Lee, Symbolic Logic and Mechanical Theorem Proving, Academic Press, Inc., Orlando, FL, 1997
• 4: Aspassia Daskalopulu , Marek Sergot, The representation of legal contracts, AI & Society, v.11 n.1-2, p.6-17, Nov. 1, 1997 [doi>10.1007/BF02812435]
• 5: Ernest Davis, Knowledge and communication: a first-order theory, Artificial Intelligence, v.166 n.1-2, p.81-139, August 2005 [doi>10.1016/j.artint.2005.05.002]
• 6: Pieter Dijkstra , Floris Bex , Henry Prakken , Kees De Vey Mestdagh, Towards a multi-agent system for regulated information exchange in crime investigations, Artificial Intelligence and Law, v.13 n.1, p.133-151, January 2005 [doi>10.1007/s10506-006-9005-1]
• 7: M. Dumas, G. Governatori, A. H. M. Hofstede, and P. Oaks. A formal approach to negotiating agents development. Electronic Commerce research and Application, 1(2):193--207, 2002.
• 8: Local models semantics, or contextual reasoning = locality + compatibility, Artificial Intelligence, v.127 n.2, p.221-259, April 2001 [doi>10.1016/S0004-3702(01)00064-9]
• 9: Fausto Giunchiglia , Luciano Serafini, Multilanguage hierarchical logics, or: how we can do without modal logics, Artificial Intelligence, v.65 n.1, p.29-70, Jan. 1994 [doi>10.1016/0004-3702(94)90037-X]
• 10: C. Hamblin. Mathematical models of dialogue. Theoria, 11(2):130--155, 1971.
• 11: I. Horrocks and U. Sattler. Ontology reasoning in the shoq(d) description logic. In B. Nebel, editor, Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Joint Conference on Articial Intelligence (IJCAI-01), pages 199--204, Los Altos, 2001. Morgan Kaufmann.
• 12: P. Johannesson and P. Wohed. Modelling agent communication in a first order logic. Accounting Management and Information Technologies, 8(1):5--22, 1998.
• 13: S. Kambe. Bargaining with imperfect commitment. Games and Economic Behavior, 28(2):217--237, 1995.
• 14: Mark Klein , Peyman Faratin , Hiroki Sayama , Yaneer Bar-Yam, Negotiating complex contracts, Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems: part 2, July 15-19, 2002, Bologna, Italy [doi>10.1145/544862.544919]
• 15: Sarit Kraus , Katia Sycara , Amir Evenchik, Reaching agreements through argumentation: a logical model and implementation, Artificial Intelligence, v.104 n.1-2, p.1-69, Sept. 1998 [doi>10.1016/S0004-3702(98)00078-2]
• 16: Peter Mcburney , Rogier M. Van Eijk , Simon Parsons , Leila Amgoud, A Dialogue Game Protocol for Agent Purchase Negotiations, Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, v.7 n.3, p.235-273, November 2003 [doi>10.1023/A:1024787301515]
• 17: Susan W. McRoy, Abductive interpretation and reinterpretation of natural language utterances, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ont., Canada, 1993
• 18: Robin Milner, Communicating and mobile systems: the &pgr;-calculus, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1999
• 19: N. Obeid. Towards a model of learning through communication. Knowledge and Information Systems, 2(4):498--508, 2000.
• 20: S. Parsons, C. Sierra, and N. Jennings. Agents that reason and negotiate by arguing. J. Logic and Computation, 8(3):261--292, 1998.
• 21: Donald Perlis , Khemdut Purang , Carl Andersen, Conversational adequacy: mistakes are the essence, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, v.48 n.5, p.553-575, May 1998 [doi>10.1006/ijhc.1997.0181]
• 22: Henry Prakken , Chris Reed , Douglas Walton, Argumentation schemes and generalisations in reasoning about evidence, Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, June 24-28, 2003, Scotland, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1047788.1047794]
• 23: Fariba Sadri , Francesca Toni , Paolo Torroni, Dialogues for Negotiation: Agent Varieties and Dialogue Sequences, Revised Papers from the 8th International Workshop on Intelligent Agents VIII, p.405-421, August 01-03, 2001
• 24: M. Schroeder and R. Schweimeier. Arguments and misunderstandings: Fuzzy unification for negotiating agents. Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 70(5), 2002.
• 25: Christoph Sorge, Conclusion of contracts by electronic agents, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Artificial intelligence and law, June 06-11, 2005, Bologna, Italy [doi>10.1145/1165485.1165518]
• 26: Trevor Bench-Capon , Katie Atkinson , Alison Chorley, Persuasion and Value in Legal Argument, Journal of Logic and Computation, v.15 n.6, p.1075-1097, December 2005 [doi>10.1093/logcom/exi058]
• 27: D. Walton. Deceptive arguments containing persuasive language and persuasive definitions. Argumentation, 19(2):159--186, 2005.
• 28: D. Walton and E. C. W. Krabbe. Commitment in Dialogue. State University of New York Press, 1995.

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
bargaining, contract clauses negotiation, dialogue games, game theory, knowledge representation, legal knowledge representation, meaning negotiation, multiple agents systems