Motivated agents for informed bilateral negotiation

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology.The automation of contract negotiation has the potential to change the way B2C and B2B trade takes place. For all its promise however, contract negotiation between businesses (for instance, e-Procurement) is still not conducted automatically. The automation of contract negotiation for e-commerce trade is complicated by three factors. Firstly, the majority of contract negotiation is multi-issue. Secondly, dynamic and uncertain contextual information is typically crucial for decision making in the negotiation. Finally, business relationships that evolve from negotiation need to be accounted for. One observation made is that research in automating negotiation has not adequately addressed the role that uncertainty plays in decision making. Further more, understanding the importance of information for reducing this uncertainty is fundamental to designing software that is capable of modeling and valuing relationships that evolve from negotiation. In light of this, this dissertation proposes an architecture design for an agent that makes negotiation decisions based on the value of information that it gives away and receives, where this value is derived from the amount of uncertainty the information reduces. It is argued that an agent that values information in this way delivers superior performance in B2B-style negotiations than an agent that is not able to do so. The performance of an agent constructed with this architecture is evaluated with a series of bilateral negotiation simulations. An assessment is made on the behaviour of this agent, and a comparison is made between a strategy where decisions are made based on information exchange, and a strategy where decisions are made based on a valuation on outcomes. This architecture design is extended to a particular instance of B2B negotiation -- integrative negotiation.In integrative negotiation, goals form part of the negotiation decision making apparatus. For the architecture design extension, this dissertation outlines integrative negotiation norms described by sociological research in real world negotiation. An agent constructed with this architecture is evaluated to assess its behaviour in real world B2B-style negotiations. The dissertation concludes that, by modeling the uncertainty reduced by the communication of information, an agent is able to value the communicative interactions between itself and another agent. Business relationships are founded upon communication, and when an agent is capable of valuing its communicative interaction, then it is capable of modeling aspects of business relationships that evolve from negotiation

Towards information and global based negotiation

Negotiation is typically the way in which real world multi-issue commercial contracts are resolved and signed. The automation of negotiation in the B2B context has the potential to revolutionise trade. Intelligent agents have been proposed as the software architecture for automating negotiation. Goals are important based on the notion from [4] that an agent which focuses on negotiating by interests or goals rather than positions may increase the quality of agreement, and the speed of reaching the agreement. This paper will be presenting work towards goal based negotiation which extends an information theoretical framework for automating negotiation

Conscientiousness and Medication Adherence: A Meta-analysis

Background: Approximately a quarter to a half of all people fail to take their medication regimen as prescribed (i.e. non-adherence). Conscientiousness, from the five-factor model of personality, has been positively linked to adherence to medications in several recent studies. Purpose: This study aimed to systematically estimate the strength and variability of this association across multiple published articles and to identify moderators of this relationship. Method: A literature search identified 16 studies (N = 3,476) that met the study eligibility criteria. Estimates of effect sizes (r) obtained in these studies were meta-analysed. Results: Overall, a higher level of conscientiousness was associated with better medication adherence (r = 0.15; 95 % CI, 0.09, 0.21). Associations were significantly stronger in younger samples (r = 0.26, 95 % CI, 0.17, 0.34; k = 7). Conclusion: The small association between conscientiousness and medication adherence may have clinical significance in contexts where small differences in adherence result in clinically important effect

Industrial Relations:Reappraising the Industrial Relations Act 1971

The aim of this chapter is to provide a critical reappraisal of the Industrial Relations Act of 1971 and its legacy, drawing on documents now released at the National Archives and Modern Records Centre. The chapter argues that the Act’s association with policy failure and the infamous U-turns of the Heath premiership mask its long-term influence on the reform of industrial relations in the British context. In assessing its longer-term significance, the chapter identifies the existence of continuities in the industrial relations policy of the Conservative Party, as the crisis of Keynesianism was superseded by a neoliberal approach to the management of British capitalism. More significantly, the chapter identifies the lessons learnt by the Conservative Party and the move towards ‘step-by-step’ reform in an attempt to ensure greater policy success in the post-Heath era. As such, this chapter demonstrates how the contemporary industrial relations landscape has been shaped by the impact of this, albeit short-lived, Act