@Article{sandholm02c,
  abstract =	 {In automated negotiation systems consisting of
                  self-interested agents, contracts have traditionally
                  been binding. Leveled commitment contracts--i.e.,
                  contracts where each party can decommit by paying a
                  predetermined penalty--were recently shown to
                  improve expected social welfare even if agents
                  decommit strategically in Nash equilibrium. Such
                  contracts differ based on whether agents have to
                  declare their decommitting decisions sequentially or
                  simultaneously, and whether or not agents have to
                  pay the penalties if both decommit. For a given
                  contract, these mechanisms lead to different
                  decommitting thresholds, probabilities, and expected
                  social welfare. However, this paper shows that each
                  of these mechanisms leads to the same social welfare
                  when the contract price and penalties are optimized
                  for each mechanism separately. Our derivations allow
                  agents to construct optimal leveled commitment
                  contracts. We show that such integrative bargaining
                  does not hinder distributive bargaining: the surplus
                  can be divided arbitrarily (as long as each agent
                  benefits), e.g., equally, without compromising
                  optimality. Nonuniqueness questions are answered. We
                  also show that surplus equivalence ceases to hold if
                  agents are not risk neutral.},
  author =	 {Tuomas Sandholm and Yunhong Zhou},
  citeulike-article-id =749490,
  doi =		 {10.1016/S0004-3702(02)00275-8},
  journal =	 {Artificial Intelligence},
  keywords =	 {multiagent negotiation},
  month =	 {December},
  number =	 2,
  pages =	 {239--264},
  priority =	 3,
  title =	 {Surplus equivalence of leveled commitment contracts},
  url =
                  {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/library/sandholm02c.pdf},
  volume =	 142,
  year =	 2002
}