Web Services for Negotiation and Bargaining in Electronic Markets: Design Requirements, Proof-of-Concepts, and Potential Applications to e-Procurement

Information Systems researchers continue to develop Web services hoping that, in a near future, these services will be widely offered in the e-marketplace, using a Web-based protocol that is universally adopted for posting, locating and invoking available services. Posting services does not, however, necessarily lead to market transactions, and a number of brokering activities are needed to facilitate trade. These include, but are not limited to, service discovery and ranking, price negotiation and contract preparation. We propose a set of Web services that support the process of negotiation and bargaining to facilitate the matching of supply and demand of Web services. As a market broker, these web services would help (a) discover the supply/demand of web services in e-marketplaces; (b) find the most appropriate available service for a specific request; (c) facilitate services be modified if needed to satisfy user's needs; (d) arbitrate the pricing mechanism with the recourse to bargaining whenever necessary; and (e) generate a contract. As a proof of concept, we illustrate the potential use of Web services for negotiation and bargaining in e-procurement.     

An empirical study of an interactive,session-oriented computerized Negotiation Support System (NSS)

Negotiating is one of the four major decisional roles played by managers. In fact, resolving conflict is said to occupy 20% of a manager's working hours. This growing frequency of negotiation scenarios coupled with the increasing complexity of the issues which need to be resolved in a negotiation make the possibility of computer enhancement for negotiation very appealing. Implementations of computerized Negotiation Support Systems (NSS) in the business world, international affairs, labor law, and environmental and safety disputes have demonstrated their potential for making negotiation problems more manageable and comprehensible for negotiators. Still, pioneers in NSS research have expressed their dismay at the lack of rigorous empirical research and evaluation of NSS. In particular, research is needed which will determine how and under what circumstances negotiation processes can be enhanced by NSS support.This article describes empirical research on the effects of a highly structured, interactive NSS on the outcome of face-to-face issues resolution and the attitudes of negotiators in both low- and high-conflict situations. In a laboratory experiment, bargaining dyads played the roles of manufacturers negotiating a four-issue, three-year purchase agreement for an engine subcomponent in conditions of high and low conflict of interest. The results of the study showed that NSS support did help bargainers achieve higher joint outcomes and more balanced contracts, but that the NSS support increased negotiation time. Satisfaction was greater for NSS dyads in both conflict levels, and perceived negative climate was reduced in low conflict.One primary implication of the results of this study is that NSS developers should keep in mind the importance of providing users with a system with interactive qualities which not only enhance the decision-making process but also provide them with a sense of participation in reaching the solution, as was done in this study.     

A prototype NSS based on problem structure and suggestions toward more comprehensive negogiation support

Seeking an effective approach to supporting negotiation through the use of computer technology, we have constructed a prototype negotiation support system based on the concept of problem structure. Problem structure refers to the characteristics of the feasible settlement space and efficient frontiers as defined by the joint utility distribution of negotiators' utilities. Problem structure is recognized as playing a major role in negotiation processes and outcomes. The cognitive complexity and inherent uncertainty of typical negotiations make it difficult for negotiators to effectively visualize and “navigate” the settlement space defined by the problem structure. As a result, negotiators often resort to suboptimizing heuristics which produce inefficient and/or unsatisfying outcomes. It follows that a promising approach to negotiation support is to exploit the computational speed and graphics capabilities of computer technology to make problem structure and its implications more accessible. Thus, our prototype is designed to allow negotiators to hypothesize problem structure and to explore and manipulate the resulting settlement space quickly and easily. Preliminary experimentation has demonstrated the value of this approach and has suggested areas for extended, comprehensive support. A negotiation process formalism, Cognitive Action Theory, neural network technology, and computer simulation are well-suited to providing more comprehensive support, and we suggest an architecture for delivery through NSS.     

Design and Implementation of Business Objects for Automated Business Negotiations

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the specification, generation and exchange of business objects in the context of electronic commerce. Common business objects have been defined for product catalogs, purchase orders and other business entities. However, no business objects have been defined and implemented for supporting automated business negotiations even though business negotiation is very much an integral part of business activities. In this work, we have designed and implemented a set of business negotiation objects for supporting the bargaining type of business negotiations. These objects define the operations and information contents needed for negotiation parties to express their requirements and constraints during a bargaining process. They correspond to a set of negotiation primitives, which is a superset of the negotiation-related primitives defined in two popular languages: ACL and COOL. The implementation of these objects is patterned after the business object documents in the XML format proposed by the Open Applications Group, thus conforming to the established standard. The incorporation of several types of constraint specifications in these business negotiation objects provides the negotiation parties and the negotiation servers that represent them much expressive power in specifying callforproposals and proposals. Two synchronization problems and their solutions associated with the withdrawal and modification of negotiation proposals are addressed and presented in this paper. The use of these business negotiation objects in a bilateral bargaining protocol is also presented. We have validated the utility of these objects in an integrated network environment, which consists of two replicated negotiation servers, two commercial products, and some other university research systems that form a supply chain.     

Negotiation protocol based on ordered weighted averaging and Fuzzy metrics

ABSTRACT

Negotiation Support Systems are used to exchange offers and to improve the negotiation process. Some methods are based on perspectives like heuristics in order to bring the negotiation protocol gradually closer to reality. These approaches can be important in real negotiation as they can help to improve skillsespecially in distributive bargaining. This paper proposes a Negotiation Support framework to provide the negotiator with recommendations on making decisions in a negotiation process. To input this idea into negotiation protocols, this paper suggests that some concepts based on OWA (Ordered Weighted Averaging) and some of its metrics (Orness, Dispersion) be included in the heuristics of a structured negotiation schedule. It is expected that the support provided will aid the negotiator to make decisions during the negotiation process, to learn from the elicitation and his own behavior the results obtained can help the negotiator improving his skills in the negotiation process.     

The Design of a GDSS Meeting Preparation Tool

The facilitator is a critical resource in computer supported decision-making groups. Facilitation is a complex task, encompassing social and technical abilities, analysis and synthesis skills, and making use of planning and flexibility, which opens multiple opportunities for computational support. This paper addresses specifically the current limitations of pre-meeting support. Having the objective of increasing support to the facilitation activities that deal with the process facet, we developed a meeting preparation tool around a comprehensive model of the decision process. An experiment revealed that the tool produces considerably different meeting agendas, especially in what concerns size and diversity. An attempt to evaluate the quality of the meeting agendas indicates an increase in the clarity criterion.     

On automated e‐business negotiations: Goal,policy, strategy,and plans of decision and action

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in automated e‐business negotiations. The automation of negotiation requires a decision model to capture the negotiation knowledge of policymakers and negotiation experts so that the decision‐making process can be carried out automatically. Current research on automated e‐business negotiations has focused on defining low‐level tactics (or negotiation rules) so that automated negotiation systems can carry out automated negotiation processes. These low‐level tactics are usually defined from a technical perspective, not from a business perspective. There is a gap between high‐level business negotiation goals and low‐level tactics. In this article, we distinguish the concepts of negotiation context, negotiation goals, negotiation strategy, and negotiation tactics and introduce a formal decision model to show the relations among these concepts. We show how high‐level negotiation goals can be formally mapped to low‐level tactics that can be used to affect the behavior of a negotiation system during the negotiation process. In business, a business organization faces different negotiation situations (or contexts) and determines different sets of goals for different negotiation contexts. In our decision model, a business policymaker sets negotiation goals from different perspectives, which are called goal dimensions. A negotiation policy is a functional mapping from a negotiation context to some quantitative measures (or goal values) for the goal dimensions to express how competitive the policymaker wants to reach that set of goals. A negotiation expert who has the experience and expertise to conduct negotiations would define the negotiation strategies needed for reaching the negotiation goals. Formally, a negotiation strategy is a functional mapping from a set of goal values to a set of decision‐action rules that implement negotiation tactics. The selected decision‐action rules can then be used to control the execution of an automated negotiation system, which conducts a negotiation on behalf of a business organization.     

Modeling e-Negotiation Processes for a Service Oriented Architecture

Most of today's e-marketplaces support a single negotiation protocol. The protocol is usually built into the e-marketplace infrastructure, therefore if a new one is introduced then a time consuming and complex process of implementing it takes place. Moreover, participants in the e-marketplace need to adapt their interfaces to the new protocol, especially if they use automated tools to interact with the e-marketplace. This paper reports on a model-driven approach and a framework for rapid and user-friendly development of configurable service oriented e-negotiation systems. We believe that a formal specification of negotiation protocols and their separation from the market infrastructure that implements them is a step towards configurable e-negotiation systems. The protocols are graphically designed for the e-marketplace then mapped into web service orchestrations. Participants use automated negotiation systems to interact with the e-marketplace. These systems are generated based on the negotiation protocol implemented on the e-marketplace. A declarative language is used to specify negotiation strategies and tactics. We propose an algorithm to map Statechart models of negotiation protocols into web service orchestrations and we report on the current implementation of our framework.     

Negotiation processes,Evolutionary Systems Design,and NEGOTIATOR

A negotiation accord is often the result of an intense, laborious, and evolutionary negotiation process. During this process, disputing parties are confronted with goal, judgment, and outcome conflict. This article demonstrates the utility of a conflict resolution framework—Evolutionary Systems Design (ESD)—by using a Negotiation Support System. ESD seeks to guide negotiators to move their individual goals and judgments in such a way as to enhance the chance of achieving a common solution. As illustrated by the use of NEGOTIATOR, a multiattribute utility negotiation support system, we argue that computer mediation can prove to be an effective means to implement the ESD framework.     

A research framework for group support systems

Over the last decade, many methodologies and techniques have been devised to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of cooperative working. The efficacy of many of these approaches has not been rigorously assessed, causing doubt about their applicability and helping restrict their use. Additionally, research effort has been dissipated. The need is for a generally agreed framework within which research can be conducted and results determined. This article proposes such a framework, involving the identification of the context, process, and outcome variables which, a priori, are deemed important to understanding, and subsequently predicting, the appropriate forms of intervention in the workings of groups. Six major components have been identified: the organizational environment, the group context, the process context, the group process, the substantive outcomes, and process performance indicators. Within these six components, 16 macrovariables have been identified. Within these macrovariables, 90 variables have been selected that characterize an issue-handling situation and its outcomes. The framework is applicable to a very wide range of group support systems used in many contexts.     

Dynamics of channel negotiations: Contention and reciprocity

We examine the dynamics of channel negotiations in terms of two useful notions: contention and reciprocity. Contention refers to the degree of overall tension between bargaining opponents. It expresses itself in all areas relevant to the negotiation process: economics, communications, and perceptions. In fact, level of contention is a dimension that ties these areas inseparably to each other. Reciprocity is the mechanism through which contention is maintained at the same or comparable levels among bargaining opponents. Reciprocity can be observed in all tactics and perceptions that cause or indicate contention. We examine these notions in two negotiation experiments and establish baseline behaviors in bargaining encounters. © 1993 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Loss Aversion and Reference-Dependent Preferences in Multi-Attribute Negotiations

Negotiation analysis and game theoretic bargaining models usually assume parties to have exogenous preferences from the beginning of a negotiation on and independent of the history of offers made. On the contrary, this paper argues that preferences might be based on attribute-wise reference points changing during the negotiation process. Aversion against losses relative to the reference point determines negotiators’ decisions in the negotiation and after its termination. The emergence and implications of reference points in a negotiation context are motivated, exemplified, and modeled formally. Furthermore, data from an internet experiment on endogenous preferences in bilateral multi-attribute negotiations is presented. The data supports the behavioral model.     

Information for decision making in marketing: the use of Group Support Systems (GSS)

Group Support Systems (GSS) Technology is an information technology which seeks to support collaborative work. Extensively used to support organisational activities, it has not yet been tested to the full within the market research setting. The paper reports on a GSS focus group meeting to determine key questions of concern about the National Training Reform Agenda. Participants were leaders in a primary industry in Australia and the questions would be related to a public relations exercise. GSS provided the opportunity to deal with complex issues efficiently and yet preserve the conversational characteristics of the focus group meeting.     

Negotiation and design: Supporting resource allocation decisions through analytical mediation

The common element of all negotiations is change. Design is the key to directing and managing change, and resource allocation is the most critical component of design. Negotiations about change are, therefore, fundamentally, negotiations about design and resource allocation. Negotiations vary along a continuum, from those in which negotiators have consonant interests (share objectives) to discordant ones (disagree about appropriate objectives). The joint distribution of all possible payoffs defines thestructure of the negotiation problem—the opportunities the problem affords and constraints it imposes on negotiators. The analytical mediation approach supports the activities of an impartial, neutral third party who attempts to assist the disputants to reach a mutually satisfactory agreement. It makes use of different types of techniques to support negotiations, depending on their location along the negotiation continuum. Two case studies involving analytical mediation are reported. One case study involves a budgeting exercise, in which the negotiators' interests were essentially consonant. The second case study involves a labor-management contract problem, in which the negotiators' interests were highly discordant.     

A Recursive Protocol for Negotiating Contracts Under Non-monotonic Preference Structures

Negotiating contracts with multiple interdependent issues may yield non-monotonic preference spaces for the participating agents. These negotiations are specially challenging because of the complexity and dimension of the search space. Automated negotiation mechanisms designed and proven useful for monotonic utility spaces may fail in these negotiation scenarios. This paper presents a novel solution to the problem of automated multi-issue negotiations in the context of complex utility spaces. We seek to address the challenge of intractably large contract spaces and utility functions with multiple local optima in automated negotiation scenarios. A protocol for automated bilateral multi-attribute negotiation processes is proposed, in which the individual agents??preferences can be non-monotonic and discontinuous. The protocol is based on a recursive non-mediated bargaining mechanism, which involves two agents who simultaneously exchange proposals defined as regions within the negotiation space. An agreement on a region implies a new bargaining which is restricted to that region. This recursive process is governed by a set of rules which modulate the joint exploration of the negotiation space until an agreement is found or a deadline expires. The protocol is experimentally evaluated under monotonic and non-monotonic preference scenarios, confirming that the protocol is able to produce outcomes close to the Pareto frontier in acceptable negotiation time, outperforming previous approaches.     

模拟谈判法在国际商务谈判教学中的应用研究

模拟谈判法是在国际商务谈判实践教学中行之有效的教学方法之一。模拟谈判法的实施过程包括选择模拟谈判案例、合理分组、模拟谈判前的准备工作、实施模拟谈判、教师点评与总结、谈判报告的完善与提交六大步骤。目前的模拟谈判教学实践在课程设置、教学条件、学生掌握程度和运用能力等方面仍存在问题,应从建立专门的谈判室、提高教师的综合水平、加强英语在模拟谈判中的使用、提高实训考核所占比例等方面加以改善。     

International trade agreements between countries of asymmetric size

This paper analyzes how changes in the structure and environment of trade agreements between a small and a large country affect the efficient frontier of those self-enforcing agreements and hence, negotiation outcomes. Using the autarky punishment instead of the interior Nash punishment may provide the small country with greater bargaining power. Negotiating direct transfers under free trade instead of reciprocal tariff reductions improves the worst possible negotiation outcome for the small country. The existence of irreversible investment may strengthen (weaken) the small country’s bargaining power under the interior Nash (autarky) punishment scheme.     

How Do Ordinary Japanese Reach Consensus in Group Decision Making?: Identifying and Analyzing “Naïve Negotiation”

The purpose of this study is to investigate ways in which ordinary Japanese people negotiate in a multi-party meeting. We initially gave such a way of negotiation the tentative name of “naïve negotiation”. The analysis of the conversational data reveals three structural features of naïve negotiation: (1) at the utterance level, the participants tend to claim their opinions without providing any overt grounds, (2) at the local consensus-building level, they tend to jump to conclusions without the full examination of proposed hypotheses, (3) at the final consensus-making level, there tends to be disjunctions between discussion units. Although these features are not necessarily seen as irrational or illogical, a naïve-negotiation style can still be a trouble-source in achieving successful consensus-making. This leads us to emphasize the necessity of developing a support system for the discussants.