Tech Reports

ULCS-03-002

The Complexity of Contract Negotiation

Paul E. Dunne, Michael Wooldridge and Michael Laurence

---

Abstract

The use of agent systems as a means of implementing contract negotiation in e-commerce and e-trading environments has been the focus 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.

[Full Paper]

---

For each technical report listed here, copyright and all intellectual property rights remain with the respective authors. Copyright is effective from the year of publication in each case. By downloading a file from this page, you agree to use it only for purposes of research and scholarship. Any other use of this material or storage of it in any medium or its sale or distribution in any form is expressly forbidden without prior written permission from the authors concerned.