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Challenges in ABSS of Negotiation 257Figure 31.2.Average distance between negotiating positions of agents in nine-agent simulationwith three or more agents. Simply trading agreements on more important positionsin exchange for giving up less important positions is evidently insufficient.The problem here is that moving towards agreement with any other agent typicallyinvolves increasing the distance to some other agent. It is no doubt possibleto devise a variety of arrangements under which agents combine in pairs to reachagreement and form a coalition and then pairs of coalitions negotiate to forma super-coalition and so on until every agent is in the coalition. The value ofsuch an exercise is not clear. Certainly there is no evidence that such a tree ofbilateral agreements is a realistic description of successful negotiations, thoughequally certainly there is some element of small groups coming together onparticular issues.4. ImplicationsIf good science starts from good observation, then the implications of thesesimulation results are that we should model actual, individual processes of multilateralnegotiation. The modelling itself will doubtless yield insights into theelements of successful and unsuccessful negotiation processes and the modellingof a range of such processes is likely to inform the development of modellingtechniques that apply quite generally to descriptive simulation modelsand to capture sound negotiating processes that will usefully inform the developmentof multi agent software systems.The results reported above indicate that it will be much more difficult tosimulate successful negotiations among three or more agents and, therefore,