Page 269 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

252 Socially Intelligent Agents

It is clear that the examples of difficult negotiations involve both more parties
andlarger numbers of related issues thandothe examples of regularly successful
negotiations. But there is a second difference, as well. The examples of success
are negotiations among two parties and if the parties are in fact composed of
several individuals, within each party there are no differences of goals. Whereas
the large scale negotiations generally have to reconcile a wide range of interests.
In Northern Ireland, there are ranges of both Loyalist and Nationalist groups
and there are frequently violent incidents among such groups within the same
sectariancommunity. AnanalogousdescriptionwouldbeappositetotheIsraeli-
Palestinian or many other difficult, apparently bilateral, negotiations.
This paper is an interim report on the development of techniques for mod-
elling multilateral negotiation. To model bilateral negotiation turns out be very
straightforward but, though the modelling framework was set up to extend eas-
ily to represent negotiation among any number of parties, it is extraordinarily
difficult to capture the process of convergence of positions among three or more
parties. The nature of the difficulties encountered suggest that models of failed
negotiations provide insights into the reasons why difficulties are encountered
in real social processes. A promising means of learning about processes of
successful multilateral negotiations is to describe real instances of successful
multilateral negotiations with agent based social simulation models.
An elaboration of this suggestion is presented in the concluding section 5 on
the basis of the model described in some detail in section 3, the results of the
model with two and then with more than two negotiating agents is presented in
section 4.

2. A Model Of Multi Lateral Negotiation

The model reported here is the prototype for a description of stakeholder
negotiation in the Limberg basis of the River Meuse. There are seven such
stakeholders and a large number of issues to be resolved.
The stakeholders are ministries of the Netherlands national government, the
provincial government of Limberg, farmers, NGOs (mainly concerned with the
creation of nature reserves), shipping companies, gravel extraction companies,
households and community organisations. The issues being negotiated include
flood control, navigation, gravel extraction, the creation and maintenance of
nature reserves, agriculture. There are manifold - certainly more than two -
outcomes for many of the individual negotiating issues. Consequently, any
suitable representation of the negotiating process has to take into account the
multiplicity of stakeholders, issues and outcomes for each issue.
Over the past decade, there have been several plans with changing objectives
for the Meuse. The structure of these plans, and the relative importance of their
objectives, has changed with each of two major floods in the 1990s. After each