An Application of Automated Mediation to International Climate Treaty Negotiation

A generic framework for automated mediation of multi-attribute negotiation has recently been reported (Lai and Sycara in Group Decis Negot 18:169–187, 2009). This framework seeks to shorten time to agreement, achieve agreements that are closer to Pareto optimality, and remain tractable in situations involving multiple issues, incomplete information, and dynamic reservation utility. These objectives are all relevant to international climate treaty negotiation. Therefore, in this paper, we describe how this mediation framework can be applied to the climate policy setting and articulate a necessary extension to allow for more than two negotiating parties. We then demonstrate application of the framework, employing some simple economic and procedural assumptions. This example shows that automated mediation can add value to the negotiation process without placing an undue mental or computational burden on negotiators. Part of this value comes simply from encouraging negotiators to be explicit about their assumptions and preferences, even if most of this information is not shared with their opponents.