New developments in modeling multilateral negotiations

Abstract

The general objective of this research is developing methodologies to predict stable agreements in multilateral negotiations and study their properties. To model and analyze negotiations, a wide range of integrative or cooperative approaches can be used to identify appropriate tradeoffs for the negotiators. The negotiation problems considered here are distinctive, however, because the set of possible agreements is discrete, and specified in advance. Each decision maker has two concerns: first, achieving an alternative that is as preferable as possible; second, building support for this alternative among the other decision makers. New definitions and methodologies are proposed in this paper to model and analyze multilateral negotiations within a context of discrete choices.Majid Sheikhmohammady is with the