Show HN: Mediator.ai – Using Nash bargaining and LLMs to systematize fairness
mediator.ai45 points by sanity 16 hours ago
45 points by sanity 16 hours ago
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/
John Nash's ideas are still relevant today - highlights how great he was - I liked how you used a genetic algorithm here! 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. 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. 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! I would love something like this to use with my HOA. About to start mediation and the estimate for the mediator alone is ~$20k. 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 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. 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? I dunno man I’m not buying any of this. 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? 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) They wanted 50/50, but from the vignette Daniel didn’t continue to do 50% of the work.
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