Multi-Agent Systems and Applications

Abstract

This paper presents some of the key techniques for reaching agreements in multi-agent environments. It discusses game-theory and economics based techniques: strategic negotiation, auctions, coalition formation, market-oriented programming and contracting. It also presents logical based mechanisms for argumentations. The focus of the survey is on negotiation of self-interested agents, but several mechanisms for cooperative agents who need to resolve conflicts that arise from conflicting beliefs about different aspects of their environment are also mentioned. For space reasons, we couldn#x2019;t cover all the relevant works, and the papers that are mentioned only demonstrate the possible approaches. We present some of the properties of the approaches using our own previous work.