Conclusion

Abstract

The motivation for this book were the prospects of the use of automated negotiation in electronic business and for the coordination of software agents in autonomous systems. Automated negotiation is argued to achieve better outcomes than negotiation between humans, at lower transaction cost, and enabling higher volumes and new sorts of transactions in electronic business. Through its automation the mechanism of negotiation becomes available to autonomous systems, thereby improving the performance of these systems when negotiation is used for agent coordination and cooperation instead of existing often simplistic and rigid interaction mechanisms.