Searching for joint gains in multi-party negotiations

We develop a constructive approach to multi-party negotiations over continuous issues. The method is intended to be used as a mediator's tool for step-by-step creation of joint gains in order to reach a Pareto-optimal agreement. During the mediation process, the parties are only required to answer relatively simple questions concerning their preferences; they do not have to reveal their utility functions completely. The method generates jointly improving directions to move along, and it is a non-trivial generalization of the recently proposed two-party methods. We give a mathematical analysis together with a numerical example, but also a practical basis for negotiation support in real-world settings. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.