Implications of Negotiation Theory for Research and Development of Negotiation Support Systems

This paper summarizes a parametric theory of negotiation as a basis forshedding light on negotiation support system possibilities. Previously, thetheory has been used to analyze prior research accomplishments in the area ofnegotiation support systems. Here, we discuss implications of the theory thatare relevant for future research and development of negotiation supportsystems. The implications are concerned with three topics: a high-levelgeneric characterization of these systems, an identification of theirpossible support functions, and a taxonomy for classifying suchsystems.     

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.     

Negotiation via the World Wide Web: A Cross-cultural Study of Decision Making

INSPIRE is a Web-based system for the support and conduct of negotiations. The primary uses of the system are training and research. Between July 1996 and April 1997, 281 bilateral negotiations were conducted through the system by managers, engineers and students from over 50 countries. INSPIRE has been used at eight universities and training centers. In research it is being used to study cross-cultural differences in decision making and the use of computer support in negotiation. This paper outlines the system, the negotiation methodology embedded in it, and reports the initial results of the experimental study of the impact of culture on Web-based bilateral negotiation.     

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.     

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.     

B2B Negotiation Support: The Need for a Communication Perspective

Negotiation support is an important challenge for business-to-business e-commerce that is still poorly supported in current information systems. One reason is that negotiation processes are much harder to formalize than the business processes in the fulfilment phase. The goal of this paper is to provide the basis for a formal analysis of different types of electronic negotiations which can help developers of future negotiation support systems. The analysis is performed from a communication perspective, in particular, Habermas' theory of communicative action. Using this perspective, a distinction can be made between norm-oriented, goal-oriented and document-based negotiation. Whereas traditional modeling methods take a data-oriented view, the theory of communicative action supports a communication-oriented view that provides more insight in the logic of negotiation processes. The analysis forms the basis for the negotiation support prototype implemented within the ESPRIT project MeMo (Mediating and Monitoring Electronic Commerce) which was aimed at B2B e-commerce for SMEs in Europe.     

Qualitative representations of negotiations: Tutorial on a rule-based approach

This article introduces a logic-based approach for structuring and representing negotiation problems and for supporting negotiators. It is argued that rule-based formalism allows for integrating decision-making aspects unique and specific to negotiations with general reasoning mechanisms based on rationality postulates. The discussion of the rule-based systems and its application to negotiation modeling and support is preceded by an outline of qualitative and quantitative approaches to problem representation and reasoning, and an overview of predicate calculus. The advantages and disadvantages of rule-based systems and their ability to capture complex negotiation decision processes and reasoning are also given.     

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.     

Beyond "Yes or No" - Extending Access Control in Groupware with Awareness and Negotiation

We present three scenarios concerning access to documents in three real world fields of application, which have in common that they are very difficult to support with classical anticipative access control systems. We show, how - based on a highly configurable notification and negotiation service, which is tightly integrated with a classical access control system - the common permission and denial options can be extended with awareness and negotiation and how this approach supports the three initial access scenarios. We also introduce our implementation of the notification and negotiation service in the PoliTeam project.     

A Multi-Attribute Negotiation Support System with Market Signaling for Electronic Markets

Despite the rapid growth of technology and Internet-based markets, many of the current systems limit themselves to price as the single dimension variable and offer, if at all, only minimal negotiation support to the consumer. In the real world, commercial transactions take into account many other parameters both quantitative and qualitative such as product quality, speed, reputation, after sales service, etc. This paper discusses how these multiple attributes can be captured to augment standard negotiation processes in order to support electronic market transactions. Using a combination of utility theory and multicriteria decision-making, we propose heuristic algorithms to discover potential trades. In addition, the approach is included within a larger framework that incorporates market-signaling mechanisms. This not only allows for the systematic evolution of negotiation positions among buyers and sellers but can ultimately lead towards improving both market transparency and efficiency. To illustrate the multiple criteria model coupled with the dynamic market signaling framework, we report in this paper the implementation of a Web-based clearinghouse that serves the real estate market.     

The Effects of Multimedia Communication on Web-Based Negotiation

With the rapid growth of electronic commerce, there is growing demand forremote online negotiations. Although the Internet now enables audio and video communication, most Web-based negotiation systems are still text-based. There is, however, a lack of research on the effects of multimedia on remote negotiations. In this paper, we present a theoretical model to investigate the impacts of multimedia communication in an online negotiation setting. The constructs in our model include communication efficiency, communication effectiveness, and positive and negative social-emotional communication. Through a simulated house purchasing negotiation experiment, we study how different multimedia combinations (text only; text with audio; text with audio and video) affect our constructs and thus further influence negotiation results. Our results showed that both text with audio and text with audio and video communication were significantly preferred to text alone. However, the addition of video to text and audio communication in a negotiation environment was not found to be beneficial. It did not significantly improve communication efficiency, effectiveness or positive social-emotional communication, but distracted negotiators from focusing on the negotiation task. Our analysis also revealed that the communication efficiency construct did not correlate with the perceived success of the negotiation solution; however communication effectiveness and social-emotional communication did correlate with negotiation satisfaction.     

Efficient Multi-Attribute Negotiation with Incomplete Information

Multi-attribute negotiation is an important mechanism for distributed decision makers to reach agreements in real-world situations. It allows the possibility of reaching “win-win” solutions for both parties, who trade off different attributes in a solution. Existing research on multi-attribute negotiations has mainly focused on the situations when negotiation parties have complete information about each other's preference. This paper presents a model with incomplete information, while considering Pareto-efficiency and computational efficiency. A non-biased mediator, who applies query learning to maintain near Pareto-efficiency without heavy computation, is adopted in the model. In addition, the mediating mechanism proposed in the model overcomes the difficulty of preference elicitation which usually arises in the preliminary step of a multi-attribute negotiation. Our model also reduces the negotiation complexity by decomposing the original n-dimensional negotiation space into a sequence of negotiation base lines. Agents can negotiate upon a base line with rather simple strategies. The experimental results show that near Pareto-efficient agreements can be reached effectively.     

On-line/Off-line: Joint Negotiation Teaching in Montreal and Vienna

E-business systems, the most recent generation of information systems, can be effectively used in teaching. One such system was developed and used in a collaborative project that involved teaching of negotiation theory and practice to students from Austria and Canada. The system provides customized course materials and a platform to conduct various e-negotiation activities. The design allows combining e-learning technologies designed to support students in their independent and individual learning with conventional face-to-face training. Our experience indicates that professional negotiation training accompanied by e-learning, and tools to support decision-making and negotiation can foster students' appreciation of the technology as well as demonstrate its limitations. The combination of technology-intensive and conventional resources contributed to students' awareness of social influences on negotiations, importance of communication, and focussed their attention on the problem and its solution. Deeper customization of the course content and delivery may further contribute to effective learning and acquiring of both communication and analytical skills.     

Towards a Structured Design of Electronic Negotiations

Global communication networks and advances in information technology enable the design of information systems facilitating effective formulation and efficient resolution of negotiation problems. Increasingly, these systems guide negotiators in clarifying the relevant issues, provide media for offer formulation and exchange, and help in achieving an agreement. In practice, the task of analysing, modelling, designing and implementing electronic negotiation media demands a systematic, traceable and reproducible approach. An engineering approach to media specification and construction has these characteristics. In this paper, we provide a rationale for the engineering approach that allows pragmatic adoption of economic and social sciences perspectives on negotiated decisions for the purpose of supporting and undertaking electronic negotiations. Similarities and differences of different theories that underlie on-going studies of electronic negotiations are identified. This provides a basis for integration of different theories and approaches for the specific purpose of the design of effective electronic negotiations. Drawing on diverse streams of literature in different fields such as economics, management, computer, and behavioural sciences, we present an example of an integration of three significant streams of theoretical and applied research involving negotiations, traditional auctions and on-line auctions.     

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.     

Two-Party Negotiation Modeling: An Integrated Fuzzy Logic Approach

Game theoretic models attempted to predict unique equilibrium outcomes of negotiations with limited success. The imprecise character of negotiation is often altered to fit the game theorist's exacting approach. Alternative models deviated from the formal game theoretic approach and attempted to accommodate concepts such as negotiator power and time pressure. In this paper, we introduce a model which uses a fuzzy logic approach to deal with the imprecision in the negotiation process and to integrate several negotiation theories. The new model is used to simulate multiple-issue, two-party negotiations and results are consistent with established negotiation theories.     

Loose with the Truth: Predicting Deception in Negotiation

Using a simulated, two-party negotiation, we examined how characteristics of the actor, target, and situation affected deception. To trigger deception, we used an issue that had no value for one of the two parties (indifference issue). We found support for an opportunistic betrayal model of deception: deception increased when the other party was perceived as benevolent, trustworthy, and as having integrity. Negotiators’ goals also affected the use of deception. Individualistic, cooperative, and mixed dyads responded differently to information about the other party’s trustworthiness, benevolence, and integrity when deciding to either misrepresent or leverage their indifference issue. Mixed dyads displayed opportunistic betrayal. Negotiators in all-cooperative and all-individualistic dyads used different information in deciding whether to leverage their indifference issues and used the same information (benevolence) differently in deciding whether to misrepresent the value of their indifference issue. Mara Olekalns is a Professor of Management (Negotiations) at the Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on communication processes in negotiation. In her research, she has investigated how strategy sequences shape negotiation outcomes. She is extending this research to investigate how impressions and communication shape trust in negotiation. Her work on communication processes in negotiation has been published in Journal of Applied Psychology, Human Communication Research, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Philip L. Smith is a Professor in the Department of Psychology, University of Melbourne. His primary research interest is in building quantitative models of the human visual system. He also applies his modeling expertise to analyses of communication processes in negotiation, focusing on the relationships between situational and dispositional factors, strategy sequences and negotiation outcomes. It has been published in leading management and psychology journals, including Human Communication Research, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. Authors' Note The research reported in this paper was supported by a Discovery Grant from the Australian Research Council. We thank Ania Ratzik and Rudi Crncec for assistance with data coding. Correspondence should be addressed to Mara Olekalns, Melbourne Business School, University of Melbourne, 200 Leicester St, Carlton, Victoria, 3053, Australia or via email to m.olekalns@mbs.edu