AIJ Journal 2005 Journal Article
The complexity of contract negotiation
- Paul E. Dunne
- Michael Wooldridge
- Michael Laurence
The use of software agents for automatic contract negotiation in e-commerce and e-trading environments has been the subject of considerable recent interest. A widely studied abstract model considers the setting in which a set of agents have some collection of resources shared out between them and attempt to construct a mutually beneficial optimal reallocation of these by trading resources. The simplest such trades are those in which a single agent transfers exactly one resource to another—so-called ‘one-resource-at-a-time’ or ‘O-contracts’. In this research note we consider the computational complexity of a number of natural decision problems in this setting.