Fairness by Discussion

Abstract

The field of automated negotiation promises to improve negotiations, thus, a fair outcome and process should also be considered when building these systems. However, issues exist with computational approaches to fairness with which the field of computer science is mainly concerned. To this end, we propose a new approach to fairness based on that of essentially contested concepts to see if argumentation-based negotiation could be used as an extension to the Stacked Alternating Offers Protocol to improve fairness. Looking at fairness as an essentially contested concept shows that discussion between people somehow influenced by the negotiation system is necessary to maintain its fairness. This in turn means that systems that provide accessible context are fairer than systems that would not do so. Thus arguments, if implemented in an accessible manner, add more context to the negotiation, in turn making an SAOP negotiation fairer.