Speaker: Ulle Endriss (ILLC) Title: Negotiating Socially Optimal Allocations of Resources Date and time: Friday 7 October 2005, 16:00 Location: P-3.27, Euclides Building, Plantage Muidergracht 24, Amsterdam A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this talk, I'm going to introduce an abstract negotiation framework where agents can agree on multilateral deals to exchange bundles of indivisible resources. I'm then then going to analyse how these deals affect social welfare for different instances of the basic framework and for different interpretations of the concept of social welfare itself. In particular, I'm going to discuss the circumstances under which a negotiation system can be guaranteed to converge to a socially optimal allocation of resources, as well as some related complexity questions.