Contract clause negotiation by game theory

ABSTRACT

Several recent investigations in Artificial Intelligence and Law have dealt with the problem of "contract clause negotiation", often seen as a specific type of "meaning negotiation". Though a consistent effort has been spent in modelling situations in which two agents mediate the rules to govern a cooperation stipulated in a contract, there is still a lack of formalisation for such a task from a logical viewpoint, and specifically, no model exists, to the best of our knowledge, in the current literature, that represents the negotiation process directly using techniques of the Theory of zero-sum Games, although the majority of scholars admit that the behaviour of agents negotiating in contract definition are quite well modelled by that approach. In particular, we propose to model peer-to-peer meaning negotiation process by a zerosum game, known in Game Theory literature as Bargaining. This approach shows its usefulness in the development of a methodology for obtaining shared theories from distinct ones, and we apply it directly in a framework in which it is possible to represent Contract Clause Negotiation processes.

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• Theory of computation