Negotiation in Strategy Making Teams: Group Support Systems and the Process of Cognitive Change

This paper reports on the use of a Group Support System (GSS) to explore at a micro level some of the processes manifested when a group is negotiating strategy—processes of social and psychological negotiation. It is based on data from a series of interventions with senior management teams of three operating companies comprising a multi-national organization, and with a joint meeting subsequently involving all of the previous participants. The meetings were concerned with negotiating a new strategy for the global organization. The research involved the analysis of detailed time series data logs that exist as a result of using a GSS that is a reflection of cognitive theory.     

Contrasting Single User and Networked Group Decision Support Systems for Strategy Making

The use of computers to support group work – as a Group Decision Support System (GDSS) – on strategy making has grown over the last decade. Some GDSS's have a facilitator managing the computer with the group viewing a public screen displaying the debate, problem definition, and agreements of the group as it negotiates strategies. Others involve members of the group in the direct input of data that forms part of the problem definition – data that is then used by the group employing electronic voting and other organizing devices. This paper discusses a real case relating to an organization seeking to reach important agreements about its strategy. The case involved the top management team and over 50 senior managers. The organization used a facilitator driven GDSS for some of this work, and a networked system for other parts. Some of the meetings were video taped, some were observed through one-way mirrors, and all of the participants were interviewed about their reactions to the different systems. This paper reports on some of the significant contrasts between the two approaches.     

Deception Performance in Online Group Negotiation and Decision Making: The Effects of Deception Experience and Deception Skill

Deception in computer-mediated group Negotiation and decision making presents a variety of risks. Gaining a better understanding of online deception has important implications for both individuals and organizations. Despite the rapidly increasing number of online deception cases reported in recent years, extant deception research has not considered the context beyond individuals or small groups. Additionally, there has been a mismatch between the important role of individual characteristics of the deceiver in theory and the lack of empirical investigation of their impact in research. This study aims to assess deception performance in mid-sized online groups by building a model of individual differences in deception experience and deception skill. We conceptualize deception performance in terms of deception success and two other new constructs, namely survivability and productivity. The model has been tested with a dataset collected from a real-world online community. The results show that deception skill has a positive effect on deception success, but deception experience has a negative effect. Although deception experience and deception skill are found to have opposite effects on the success of deceivers, both contribute positively to the survivability of deceivers. The findings of this study have significant implications for future deception research in online group communication and negotiation.     

Menu Dependence and Group Decision Making

This paper is concerned with the problem of group decision making. We introduce the notion of a collective system rule. A collective system rule maps each preference profile to a group-preference system, which is a collection of social preferences on the subsets of the alternatives. By formulating the Arrovian conditions, we show the Arrow-type impossibility theorems. We also discuss how our approach is related to the standard group decision-making process.     

Multiple Criteria Decision Making Models in Group Decision Support

Use of multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) models to aid the group decision process was tested. Two multiple criteria group decision support systems (MCGDSS) were studied, one using the AHP/Tchebycheff method of Iz and the other using Kersten's NEGO system. These systems were compared with a commercial GDSS, VisionQuest. VisionQuest does not include multiple criteria tools. To make the study comparable, VisionQuest was augmented with an ad hoc linear programming model that could generate solutions with specified characteristics requested by the using group. The three systems were compared on the dimensions of solution quality and decision support effectiveness.One of the hypotheses was that MCDM models would force participants to examine criteria, preferences, and aspirations more thoroughly, thus leading to decisions of better quality. Subjects using the MCGDSSs were expected to have higher mean quality and effectiveness values. However, the quality and effectiveness values of the VisionQuest/ad hoc system were found to be better on the dimension of effectiveness. Explanations for this result are included in the paper.Another hypothesis was that the AHP/Tchebycheff method of Iz, a value-oriented system, would yield more effective group support than the goal-oriented NEGO system. However, the NEGO system was found to yield solutions with better quality measures than the solutions obtained with the AHP/Tchebycheff system.Observation of the groups using the MCDM systems indicate that both the AHP/Tchebycheff and NEGO methods can be revised to enhance their effectiveness. The primary difficulty encountered with the AHP/Tchebycheff method was in the large number of pairwise comparisons required by AHP. The NEGO method can be enhanced by including specification of desired attainment levels in the first stage of the method. Both MCDM techniques have potential to benefit group decision support by giving using groups a means to design better solutions.     

Explorative Nature of Negotiation in Participatory Decision Making for Sustainability

Land use planning and policy making for environmental systems involve uncertainty, long time scales, and complex socio-natural systems and processes; most decisions are often characterized by conflict and tension and give rise to disagreements which are widely considered and managed as disagreement about socio-environmental values. Although the growing acceptance of participatory models in environmental planning and policy making is forcing the public authorities to implement participatory mechanisms, participation practices are not showing much effectiveness in reducing conflict and tension. This paper argues that negotiation approaches in participatory decision making often pose the attention on disputing actors and their related values (in the field of environmental planning, on socio-environmental values) thus amplifying the risk for conflict to sharpen. Participation practices, in fact, often use Decision and Conflict Analysis models as means to disclose structures of parties’ values and preferences to parties themselves, thus risking to enhance sources for conflict and tension. In this article, participation is conceptualized as an exploration process looking for decision ‘opportunities’ which allow transforming participatory decision making into operational collaboration. To illustrate the discussion we present a case of participatory decision making process in the Torre Guaceto wetland, a Natural Reserve in Southern Italy. The process refers to the formulation of the land use plan and is analysed by the application of a cognitive model. The analysis shows how the negotiation process evolves from a conflict to collaboration and becomes centred on the content of the decision rather than the social and environmental values involved.     

The Connectedness Decision Paradigm: Group Decision, Negotiation and Leadership in World Problems

We discuss connectedness, a dynamic unity relation experience. The Connectedness Decision Paradigm (CDP) is a formal, general systems-spirituality framework, technology-supported, for group decision and negotiation (GDN) and leadership in making “right” decisions. A right problem/solution is validated by a spiritual rationality validation test involving connectedness. A participant (agent) may experience connectedness with purposes (intended results). Purposes for which there is reciprocated (shared) purpose connectedness across agents constitute common ground for these agents. A basic idea is to identify and expand such common ground. Even in difficult problem solving, as with polarization, where there seems to be little or no common ground, a priori there is always the ultimate purpose common ground of connectedness with One (spirituality) from which other common ground as connectedness with the “other” can arise. Common ground can lead to additional common ground and to an agreed problem solution—itself constituting common ground—that can be tested for rightness. Our focus here is on human agents considered as spiritual purposeful complex adaptive systems in multiagent environments. The ideas are applicable to other agents with lesser or greater capabilities than humans according to their capabilities. Expanding earlier work, this commentary on CDP is also based on GDN 2012, 2013 meeting remarks by the author, as well as on a lecture, “Hope on the Edge of Chaos: The New Connectedness Paradigm in World Affairs”, Hamilton Hall, Salem, Massachusetts, February 2012. In presenting CDP, this commentary is also a call for problem solving frameworks for GDN and leadership, and solutions to world problems.     

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.     

A Time-Bound Framework for Negotiation and Decision Making of Virtual Manufacturing Enterprise

Virtual manufacturing has 2 characteristics as an agent-based electronic commerce environment: dynamic nature of resource status and variety of agents' decision-making (i.e., scheduling) model. To reflect the characteristics, a relevant negotiation protocol should be designed and an appropriate decision-making model should be developed. In this article, from the perspective of a sales agent that is a middle man between customers and manufacturers in a virtual manufacturing environment, we provide a case study that suggests a time-bound framework for external negotiation between sales agents and customer agents, and internal cooperation between sales agents and manufacturing agents. We assume a job shop as the production model of a virtual manufacturing enterprise and formulate the optimal order selection problem with mixed integer programming, but its computation time is not acceptable for real-world problems. For this time-constrained decision making, we develop a genetic algorithm as an anytime problem-solving method for the scheduling of the production model, which shows a reasonable computation time for real-world cases and good incremental problem-solving capability.     

Experimental Study on Negotiation Process in Participatory Decision Making Process in a Community

In participatory decision making process in a community, plural participants, such as governmental agencies, local municipalities, citizen groups and private companies are involved in the process. For achieving resolution, the methodologies for sharing understanding on a problem and formation of cooperative relationship are important. In this paper, the game experiment for observing people??s behaviors in conflicts is designed. In the game experiment, subjects are asked to negotiate with their counterparts. The games have similarities with typical conflicts which can arise frequently in participatory decision making process. The role of communication in participatory decision making process is also discussed.     

Multi-criteria Group Decision Making with Various Ordinal Assessments

Group Decision and Negotiation - This paper proposes a method for addressing multi-criteria group decision making (MCGDM) problems with various types of ordinal assessments. In addition to two...     

Monte Carlo Simulation Techniques in a Decision Support System for Group Decision Making

This paper describes a group decision support system based on an additive multi-attribute utility model for identifying a consensus strategy in group decision-making problems where several decision-makers or groups of decision-makers elicit their own preferences separately. On the one hand, the system provides procedures to quantify the DMs or group of DMs preferences separately. This involves assessing the DMs or group of DMs component utilities that represent their preferences regarding the respective possible attribute values and objective weights that represent the relative importance of the criteria. On the other hand, we propose Monte Carlo simulation techniques for identifying a consensus strategy. An iterative process will be carried out, where, after the simulations have been performed, the imprecise component utilities and weights corresponding to the different DMs or groups of DMs are tightened to output more meaningful information in the next simulations to achieve a consensus strategy. Finally, an application to the evaluation of remedial strategies for restoring contaminated aquatic ecosystems illustrates the usefulness and flexibility of this decision support tool.