Common use of Pre-negotiation Phase Clause in Contracts

Pre-negotiation Phase. In the pre-negotiation phase, the mediator co- ordinates the following intra-team protocol to dis- cover the set of forbidden unpredictable partial of- fers FA for the team . The set of forbidden unpre- dictable partial offers for the team, FA, is defined as FA = {Xj|∃a ∈ A, Xj ∈ Fa}. This means that any unpredictable partial offer in FA is never part of an acceptable offer for at least one team mem- ber. Thus, these unpredictable partial offers should be avoided for the team since the goal of the nego- tiation model is reaching unanimously acceptable agreements. S A formal description of the pre-negotiation pro- tocol is presented in Figure 3. The picture describes the protocol by means of Agent UML sequence di- agrams. According to the proposed protocol, the team mediator initiates the pre-negotiation phase by asking each team member a to calculate its own set of forbidden unpredictable partial offers Fa (message 1 in Figure 3). Each team member builds its own (forbidden) set as requested, and it is com- municated to the mediator privately (message 2 in Figure 3). When the mediator receives the sets from the team members, it aggregates them in order to construct the set of forbidden unpredictable partial offers for team A, FA = Fa. Then, the team a∈A mediator makes public the list of forbidden unpre- dictable partial offers of the team FA (message 3 in Figure 3). It should be stated that, since any unpredictable partial offer in this set will prevent one of the team members from reaching its ▇▇▇▇▇- vation utility, the team is not allowed to generate an offer involving any of these partial offers in FA. After the team mediator has shared FA with team members, the negotiation phase starts. The reader may realize that it is possible that during this phase, most of the unpredictable par- tial offers are pruned. In that case, it means that there is little potential for cooperation among team members. This issue can be observed by the team mediator prior to starting any negotiation process. In that case, the team mediator may suggest the team not to negotiate and save the computational resources used in the negotiation. If the team is not static and can be dynamically formed, it may suggest team members to disband the team and look for other potential partners. However, this team/coalition formation(▇▇▇▇▇▇ and desJardins, 2005; ▇▇▇▇▇▇ et al., 2009) is outside of the scope of this work since we focus on studying the perfor- 1. INFORM Start negotiation 2. INFORM Start negotiation 3. ACK