Arguing and negotiating in the presence of social influences

When agents operate in a society with incomplete information and with diverse and conflicting influences, they may, in certain instances, lack the knowledge, the motivation and/or the capacity to enact all their commitments. However, to function as a coherent society it is important for these agents to have a means to resolve such conflicts and to come to a mutual understanding about their actions. To this end, argumentation-based negotiation provides agents with an effective means to resolve conflicts within a multi-agent society. However, to engage in such argumentative encounters, agents require four fundamental capabilities; a schema to reason in a social context, a mechanism to identify a suitable set of arguments, a language and a protocol to exchange these arguments, and a decision making functionality to generate such dialogues. This paper presents formulations of all of these capabilities and proposes a coherent framework that allows agents to argue, negotiate, and, thereby, resolve conflicts within a multi-agent society.