Distributed Negotiation for Collective Decision-Making

Collective decision-making is a process in which participants make a collective choice from several alternatives. In this paper, we focus on collective decision contexts in which more than two selfish agents negotiate over multiple issues. We specifically consider a case of joint household energy purchase where the concerned households have to define a collective energy contract. The households involved may each be interested only in a subset of the issues at stake. We devise an effective protocol to regulate the interactions among the (household) agents and reduce their reasoning complexity. The mechanism we introduce is fully decentralized, it facilitates multi-lateral negotiation, and it reduces the complexity of the solution despite the inherent complexity of the problem.