The complexity of contract negotiation

The use of software agents for automatic contract negotiation in e-commerce and e-trading environments has been the subject 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. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.