Unless a community is a total dictatorship or is given to complete anarchy, there will be some form of sociality that is conducive to at least a weak form of agreement-seeking, or congruency. Cooperative societies may be expected to agree to work together, competitive societies may be expected to agree to oppose each other, and mixed-motive societies may be expected to agree to compromises that balance their interests. The procedures used to arrive at these agreements, however, are not determined simply as a function of the preference structure of the decision makers, either for von Neumann–Morgenstern scenarios or for satisficing scenarios. Instead, the procedures often involve some form of negotiation. Negotiation is a deliberative process whereby multiple decision makers can evaluate and share information when they have incentives to strike a mutually acceptable compromise.

In this chapter we first review von Neumann–Morgenstern N-person game theory, which forms the basis of classical negotiation theory. We then describe a new approach to negotiation based on satisficing game theory.