Posted by sanity 23 hours ago
Yet if John Nash had solved negotiation in the 1950s, why did it seem like nobody was using it today? The issue was that Nash's solution required that each party to the negotiation provide a "utility function", which could take a set of deal terms and produce a utility number. But even experts have trouble producing such functions for non-trivial negotiations.
A few years passed and LLMs appeared, and about a year ago I realized that while LLMs aren’t good at directly producing utility estimates, they are good at doing comparisons, and this can be used to estimate utilities of draft agreements.
This is the basis for Mediator.ai, which I soft-launched over the weekend. Be interviewed by an LLM to capture your preferences and then invite the other party or parties to do the same. These preferences are then used as the fitness function for a genetic algorithm to find an agreement all parties are likely to agree to.
An article with more technical detail: https://mediator.ai/blog/ai-negotiation-nash-bargaining/
We built a way to make contracts enforceable and resolve disputes without the high cost of litigation. Specifically, by adding our arbitration clause to your contracts or using our "case by consent" you can get AI driven court-enforceable arbitration decisions in 7 days for a $500 flat fee - no lawyers required. This compares to the $30k or $40k you would otherwise spend on a lawyer+ JAMS/AAA arbitration fees. For your HOA, I suspect the case by consent would be the best approach - two parties come to the website, both agree to use DecisionLayer to resolve the dispute and then present the issue and each side's argument.
We have free case simulator on our site. Check it out at https://www.decisionlayer.ai/simulate
Is anyone working on this ? seems like a big win for AI if it can be done.
I regenerated the Israel/Palestine agreement using my latest code although the input positions were as they were this time last year when hostages were still being held.
Interested to hear what you think: https://gist.github.com/sanity/3851e33e085ed444525edcc7b7ba2...
This thing you point out is exactly why Nash demanded invariance under affine transformations in his solution. Using completely arbitrary units if I rank everything as having importance 1 million, that's exactly the same as ranking everything as having importance 1, and also the same as ranking everything as having importance 0.
The solution is only sensitive to diffences in the unitity function, not the actual values of the function. If you want to weight something very strongly in the Nash version of the game you also have to weight other things correspondingly weakly.
There is the potential for parties to get better deals by overstating their BATNAs, but then they risk the other party rejecting the agreement when a mutually beneficial agreement was possible - so it's not in their interests to mislead the system.
That said, given the fictional example:
Honestly I’m on Daniel’s side - they agreed on a 50/50 split, and they’ve both been working their asses off to make the business work. It’s an arrangement that clearly both of them have been actively participating in, not trying to push back against, for a year and a half.
And the supposed insight this product offers is to… split the difference? Between Maya’s power play for 70/30, and Daniel’s insistence on the original 50/50? 60/40 is the brilliant proposal?
How could they stand to work together afterwards, knowing she thinks she deserves 70% of the profit, but was willing to ‘settle’ for 60%? Why would you want to keep working with someone who screwed you over that way? Their partnership is toast. All the mediation really does is… I don’t know, what? How is this good for Daniel? This ain’t any kind of reconciliation, surely.
Is the argument that it’d be easier for her to get a new baker, than it is for him to get a new business manager?
I've made some changes that should help with this.
These characters have both been putting the work in.
I’d be looking for a serpent at his partner’s ear, planting poisonous suggestions that she deserves more of the company they started equally. If this were real.
That's the problem, the story is saying he stopped focusing full-time on the business in order to make his own ends meet. It looks like the main innovation of the mediator generated deal is that it attempts to reconcile by drafting a way back in to 50/50 if he recommits. The starting 60/40 split is not that important.
This is certainly an example of what I would expect from a product designed to optimize a prenup. You know, they say money ruins people, but sometimes you just have to acknowledge there was nothing really ever there decent to begin with.