Eight years ago, my then-fiancée and I decided to get a prenup, so we hired a local mediator. The meetings were useful, but I felt there was no systematic process to produce a final agreement. So I started to think about this problem, and after a bit of research, I discovered the Nash bargaining solution.
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/
lookACamel2 hours ago
Great idea though I am skeptical it will be adopted in contentious situations without some sort of stick. In amorphous situations where there is just high trust but an aversion to talking things out I could see this kind of tool being used. But in contentious or low trust situations (strangers) I suspect most people do not want fairness, they want to be ahead. A fair agreement will, paradoxically, disappoint everyone since every party feels the lack of clear advantage.
hawest2 hours ago
Super interesting, thank you for sharing!
I have published some research on using LLMs for mediation here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.16732 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.07053
These papers describe the LLMediator, a platform that uses LLMs to:
a) ensure a discussion maintains a positive tone by flagging and offering reformulated versions of messages that may derail the conversation
b) suggest intervention messages that the mediator can use to intervene in the discussion and guide the parties toward a positive outcome.
Overall, LLMs seem to be very good at these tasks, and even compared favourably to human-written interventions. Very excited about the potential of LLMs to lower the barrier to mediation, as it has a lot of potential to resolve disputes in a positive and collaborative manner.
vintermann3 hours ago
This doesn't seem to have any notion of power? Coming up with a fair agreement between people who have equal power over the thing they care equally about, isn't that hard.
But when one side is indifferent to something the other side cares deeply about, yet has veto power to spoil it, a Nash agreement isn't going to be "fair" in the usual sense of the word.
maxaw2 hours ago
In reality people never have equal power over anything (what would that look like, physically?) so something like nash bargaining is an attempt to get closer to a notion of fair given this inequality
vintermann2 hours ago
I don't think the difficulty of equal power is a good excuse to pretend power doesn't exist.
One way we solve it in the real world is that the negotiators also have power - including, possibly, the power to force the party most OK with the status quo to come to the negotiating table, and reject exploitative proposals.
That isn't foolproof either, of course. But it beats rhetoric trying to convince the weaker party to submit.
aroido-bigcat3 hours ago
Feels like the tricky part here isn’t computing a “fair” outcome, but defining what fairness even means in the first place.
Once you formalize preferences into something comparable, you’re already making a lot of assumptions about how people value outcomes.
alex1sa2 hours ago
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maxaw2 hours ago
This is so cool. Even small disputes like roommate arrangements can feel very emotionally impactful at the time and it would be wonderful to have a tool for these moments
ttul5 hours ago
Fabulous idea. LLM-assisted mediation is brilliant because it has the potential to bring the benefits of mediation to the masses. The addressable market is all of humanity. Even if all you did was focus this app on co-parenting arguments, you could help millions of people every day.
Zababa16 minutes ago
Very interesting! For limitations, I'd add stated vs revealed preference. Currently the system assumes than what people say is what they actually prefer, but that's not always the case. If that is already addressed in your tool, I think it would be nice to mention it!
dhruv30063 hours ago
John Nash's ideas are still relevant today - highlights how great he was - I liked how you used a genetic algorithm here!
danieldifficult4 hours ago
Brilliant! Love seeing this space start to wake up.
Last year I built https://andshake.app to prevent the need for conflict resolution… by getting things clear up front.
I agree that AI has much to offer in low-stakes agreements to help people move forward in cooperation.
aspect05453 hours ago
Looks interesting. But where’s the privacy policy or at least information what happens with all the sensitive stuff you enter there. Because let’s be honest, a lot of the stuff that is awkward to talk about is somewhat private.
zachvandorp5 hours ago
Its an interesting idea. I've seen a few of these but not with ol' John's spin on it.
Do you want the first link "How it Works" to really be just the # of front page? it makes it feel like it's broken if someone clicks it. Also your blog about Nash Bargaining is almost more of a "How it Works" page than the How it Works page is.
I feel like your landing page very quickly told me what your website does which is great. If the Nash Bargaining is the "wedge" to separate you from the pack, I'd try explain how that differentiates this over the others as quickly as possible. I know that's easier said than done. Good luck!
mfrye04 hours ago
I would love something like this to use with my HOA. About to start mediation and the estimate for the mediator alone is ~$20k.
wferrell4 hours ago
You might try Decisionlayer.ai
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
arowthway25 minutes ago
I'd rather arbitrate by coin toss.
mukundesh5 hours ago
How about Iran/US conflict ? or Israel/Palestine conflict ?
Is anyone working on this ? seems like a big win for AI if it can be done.
watwut3 hours ago
Pakistan is working on the Iran/US conflict.
watwut3 hours ago
Basically, the negotiating game is will break down to demanding absolute maximum and pretending you care a lot more then you care. The more demanding person gets more, less demanding person is taken for a ride.
eigenket2 hours ago
I don't know anything about this specific LLM thing but if it correctly uses the Nash bargaining optimiser then that won't happen.
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.
DeathArrow2 hours ago
Then the tool should be named Trump.ai, not Mediator.ai. :)
setnone3 hours ago
definitely a great use of LLMs
arjunthazhath5 hours ago
I am unable to login
mock-possum4 hours ago
EDIT - in all fairness I find the blog entry much more persuasive: https://mediator.ai/blog/ai-negotiation-nash-bargaining/
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?
AnthonyR4 hours ago
Yeah I also don't quite understand the example on the homepage... they agreed to 50/50 and then she wanted 70/30 so now they settle on 60/40? Like this doesn't seem like a "fair" mediation it's kind of weird (obviously oversimplifying the situation a bit but nonetheless I'm not sure real world conflicts are this simple in practice)
alex435783 hours ago
They wanted 50/50, but from the vignette Daniel didn’t continue to do 50% of the work.
mock-possum3 hours ago
Sure, he just continued to take sole responsibility for the production of the product, quality and quantity, while also holding down an additional job, which paid the rent.
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.
lookACamel2 hours ago
> While also holding down an additional job
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.
throwanem19 minutes ago
Her ends, too. They share an apartment, in the story.
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 of any worthy caliber to begin with.
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