Cite as:

Mark Klein, Peyman Faratin, Hiroki Sayama, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, Negotiating complex contracts, Group Decision and Negotiation 12(2): 111–125 (2003).

or: Mark Klein, Peyman Faratin, Hiroki Sayama, and Yaneer Bar-Yam, Negotiating complex contracts, in Proceedings of the AAAI Fall 2001 Symposium on Negotiation Methods for Autonomous Cooperative Systems (2001).

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Work to date on computational models of negotiation has focused almost exclusively on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues and tractable contract spaces. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-optimal social welfares for negotiations with binary issue dependencies.