7,753 research outputs found

    Coordination in software agent systems

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    How Participation Creates Citizens: Participatory Governance as Performative Practice

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    Participation is a prominent feature of many decision-making and planning processes. Among its proclaimed benefits is its potential to strengthen public support and involvement. However, participation is also known for having unintended consequences which lead to failures in meeting its objectives. This article takes a critical perspective on participation by discussing how participation may influence the ways in which citizens can become involved. Participation unavoidably involves (1) restrictions about who should be involved and about the space for negotiation, (2) assumptions about what the issue at stake is, and (3) expectations about what the outcome of participation should be and how the participants are expected to behave. This is illustrated by a case study about the Dutch nature area, the Drentsche Aa. The case study demonstrates how the participatory process that took place and the restrictions, assumptions, and expectations that were involved resulted in six forms of citizen involvement, both intended and unintended, which ranged between creativity, passivity, and entrenchment. Based on these findings, the article argues that participation does not merely serve as a neutral place in which citizens are represented, but instead creates different categories of citizens. Recognizing this means reconceiving participation as performative practice. Such a perspective goes beyond overly optimistic views of participation as a technique whose application can be perfected, as well as pessimistic views of participation as repression or domination. Instead, it appreciates both intended and unintended forms of citizen involvement as meaningful and legitimate, and recognizes citizenship as being constituted in interaction in the context of participatio

    Post-Negotiation: Is the Implementation of Future Negotiated Environmental Agreements Threatened? A Pilot Study

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    This paper is a contribution to IIASA's research concerning the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). It explores a question -- that of post-negotiation implementation of agreements -- which is often ignored by negotiation researchers because, technically, it lies outside the process. However, given the urgency and severity of many of the environmental problems being negotiated at UNCED and on the agenda for future negotiations, it is extremely important to conduct analyses and make recommendations concerning how negotiated agreements are or should be implemented at a global, regional, and local level. While there is an emerging literature on regime building and compliance with negotiated agreements in the negotiation field, the issue of treaty ratification -- a first step in the post-negotiation process -- has received little attention. This pilot study attempts to shed some light, through a systematic analysis of historical environmental treaties, on the difficulties of ratification and their roots in treaty and issue complexity. Several policy recommendations are made, drawing upon the lessons learned from this analysis, to modify current negotiation and post-negotiation processes in such a way as to reduce treaty ratification time

    Mechanism design for distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations

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    The aggregate power of all resources on the Internet is enormous. The Internet can be viewed as a massive virtual organization that holds tremendous amounts of information and resources with different ownerships. However, little is known about how to run this organization efficiently. This dissertation studies the problems of distributed task and resource allocation among self-interested agents in virtual organizations. The developed solutions are not allocation mechanisms that can be imposed by a centralized designer, but decentralized interaction mechanisms that provide incentives to self-interested agents to behave cooperatively. These mechanisms also take computational tractability into consideration due to the inherent complexity of distributed task and resource allocation problems. Targeted allocation mechanisms can achieve global task allocation efficiency in a virtual organization and establish stable resource-sharing communities based on agentsâÃÂàown decisions about whether or not to behave cooperatively. This high level goal requires solving the following problems: synthetic task allocation, decentralized coalition formation and automated multiparty negotiation. For synthetic task allocation, in which each task needs to be accomplished by a virtual team composed of self-interested agents from different real organizations, my approach is to formalize the synthetic task allocation problem as an algorithmic mechanism design optimization problem. I have developed two approximation mechanisms that I prove are incentive compatible for a synthetic task allocation problem. This dissertation also develops a decentralized coalition formation mechanism, which is based on explicit negotiation among self-interested agents. Each agent makes its own decisions about whether or not to join a candidate coalition. The resulting coalitions are stable in the core in terms of coalition rationality. I have applied this mechanism to form resource sharing coalitions in computational grids and buyer coalitions in electronic markets. The developed negotiation mechanism in the decentralized coalition formation mechanism realizes automated multilateral negotiation among self-interested agents who have symmetric authority (i.e., no mediator exists and agents are peers). In combination, the decentralized allocation mechanisms presented in this dissertation lay a foundation for realizing automated resource management in open and scalable virtual organizations

    From consensus to confrontation - Studying strategies for states to negotiate with challenging partners in multilateral negotiations

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    The purpose of this thesis is to explicate different strategies that states can, and do, use to negotiate with challenging partners in conflict situations. A challenging partner, as defined in this thesis, refers to a key player in minority position who is blocking negotiations from reaching consensus agreements. A theoretical model containing five different strategies is developed using theories gathered from both political science and organizational theory. The theoretical model originates from Kilmann and Thomas (1976) but is adapted to fit new aspects of multilateral negotiations and conflict management in situations of deadlock. The study is a qualitative case study of negotiations taken place in Council of Europe surrounding the situation in Ukraine during 2014, depicting Russia as the challenging partner. Semi-structured interviews are used as the main data collecting method. The empirical analysis shows that three out of five strategies in the model are used by member states in practice and a comprehensive discussion is held regarding this result and its implications for theory. The question ‘why’ states choose one strategy over another and which factors have an impact on this choice is discussed with the aim of opening up for future research. The study has proven the adequacy of combining theories as done when exploring obstacles to multilateral negotiations and has laid a foundation for studying challenging partners as a phenomenon in the multilateral context

    Creativity in Negotiation: Directions of Research

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    The purpose of this paper is to examine this "eureka" phenomenon more closely -- to describe its characteristics of freshness and discovery, to assess its preconditions, and to understand how it can be activated consciously. The paper evaluates the concept of creativity as a central strategic and processual element in the dynamics of impasse resolution and one that should receive more attention by the research community

    The Post-Agreement Negotiation Process: The Problems of Ratifying International Environmental Agreements

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    National ratification of international environmental agreements is a prime example of post-agreement negotiations. It is often the first subprocess in a larger process of sustained negotiations that occur after international accords are concluded, focused on implementation of those accords. Certainly, implementation of negotiated agreements involves legal, political, verification, and enforcement activities at both domestic and international levels. Many of these activities, including ratification, are characterized by negotiations between various stakeholders to reach mutually beneficial and acceptable means to achieve national implementation of, and compliance with, treaty provisions. This paper places ratification negotiations within the larger conceptual context of post-agreement negotiations, with the goal of understanding and explaining problems of treaty compliance. An empirical analysis is conducted to assess the impact of various inherent and situational factors on problems in the ratification process. Ultimately, we are interested in identifying ways of improving the international negotiation process that initiated these later problems in implementation
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