Experiments in human multi-issue negotiation: analysis and support

The purpose of this paper is to report on experiments in (human) multi-issue negotiation and their analysis, and to present a generic software environment supporting such an analysis. First, the paper presents a System for Analysis of Multi-Issue Negotiation (SAMIN). SAMIN is designed to analyse negotiation processes between human negotiators, between human and software agents, and between software agents. The user can enter any formal property deemed useful into the system and use the system to automatically check this property in given negotiation traces. Second, the paper presents the results of applying SAMIN in the analysis of empirical traces obtained from an experiment in multi-issue negotiation about second hand cars. In the experiment the efforts of 74 humans negotiating against each other have been analysed using SAMIN.