A CEAL Libraries Self Study: Levels of e-Resource Affordability

Presented at the 2012 Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) Committee on Chinese Materials Forum on Chinese Digital Content in Toronto, ON, Canada, March 14, 2012.This study compares five years of e-resource expenditures of Council on East Asian Libraries (CEAL) 2007-2011 in relation to their collection budgets. The hypothesis is CEAL libraries should pay for electronic resources in proportion to their funding resources. The purposes of this study are to 1). Reveal CEAL libraries purchasing power; 2). Aid in E-resource negotiations; 3). Provide data for decision making 4). Promote CEAL purchase tiers classification. The goal is to promote a CEAL tiered classification based on each library's purchasing power when negotiating with vendors for electronic resources. Data used in analysis were a) CEAL 5-yr Fiscal Support (2007-11) supported by 2- yr Fiscal Support (2010-11); b) CEAL CJK database holdings and expenditures; c) Carnegie Classification & CEAL fiscal support; d) CEAL Libraries levels of purchase power. Conclusions • CEAL libraries need to develop e-resource collection development strategies, • Publishers must move away from “business as usual” and “big deals,” • Vendors need to be flexible in pricing structures, • Libraries need to level the playing field by working out an “equally affordable” plan for all members. • No Classification can be perfectly neutral or objective. CEAL stats data was from CEAL Statistics Database http://lib.ku.edu/ceal/ph

KEMNAD: A Knowledge Engineering Methodology for Negotiating Agent Development

Automated negotiation is widely applied in various domains. However, the development of such systems is a complex knowledge and software engineering task. So, a methodology there will be helpful. Unfortunately, none of existing methodologies can offer sufficient, detailed support for such system development. To remove this limitation, this paper develops a new methodology made up of: (1) a generic framework (architectural pattern) for the main task, and (2) a library of modular and reusable design pattern (templates) of subtasks. Thus, it is much easier to build a negotiating agent by assembling these standardised components rather than reinventing the wheel each time. Moreover, since these patterns are identified from a wide variety of existing negotiating agents(especially high impact ones), they can also improve the quality of the final systems developed. In addition, our methodology reveals what types of domain knowledge need to be input into the negotiating agents. This in turn provides a basis for developing techniques to acquire the domain knowledge from human users. This is important because negotiation agents act faithfully on the behalf of their human users and thus the relevant domain knowledge must be acquired from the human users. Finally, our methodology is validated with one high impact system

An Investigation of the Negotiation Domain for Electronic Commerce Information Systems

To support fully automatic business cycles, information systems for electronic commerce need to be able to conduct negotiation automatically. In recent years, a number of general frameworks for automated negotiation have been proposed. Application of such frameworks in a specific negotiation situation entails selecting the proper framework and adapting it to this situation. This selection and adaptation process is driven by the specific characteristics of the situation. This paper presents a systematic investigation of there characteristics and surveys a number of frameworks for automated negotiation

An Evolutionary Learning Approach for Adaptive Negotiation Agents

Developing effective and efficient negotiation mechanisms for real-world applications such as e-Business is challenging since negotiations in such a context are characterised by combinatorially complex negotiation spaces, tough deadlines, very limited information about the opponents, and volatile negotiator preferences. Accordingly, practical negotiation systems should be empowered by effective learning mechanisms to acquire dynamic domain knowledge from the possibly changing negotiation contexts. This paper illustrates our adaptive negotiation agents which are underpinned by robust evolutionary learning mechanisms to deal with complex and dynamic negotiation contexts. Our experimental results show that GA-based adaptive negotiation agents outperform a theoretically optimal negotiation mechanism which guarantees Pareto optimal. Our research work opens the door to the development of practical negotiation systems for real-world applications

Indo-US FTA: Prospects for the Telecommunication Sector

Since telecommunication is one of the main drivers of economic growth and globalization, WTO (World Trade Organization) negotiations and New Age FTAs (Free Trade Agreements) have focused on liberalizing trade in this sector. The present paper analyses the possibilities of liberalizing trade in telecommunication services if India and its largest trading partner-the US-enter into a bilateral agreement. The study found that India and the US have trade complementarities in telecommunication services and that it should be a priority sector in the FTA negotiations. The study identified certain areas such as R&D related to telecommunication and broadband infrastructure where collaboration between companies of both countries would be mutually beneficial. The study found that telecommunication services have been significantly liberalized in the US FTAs-much beyond the scope of the GATS and the Reference Paper on Basic Telecommunications. While the current policy regime in India is consistent with some of the requests made by the US in its bilateral negotiations, for meeting others, the policy regime needs to be examined and, if required, reformed. The present paper suggests certain reforms which would enhance the productivity, efficiency and global competitiveness of the sector and enable the country to benefit from the bilateral liberalization.Indo-US FTA, GATS, bilateral agreements, telecommunication, services

MAINTENANCE OF DATA RICHNESS IN BUSINESS COMMUNICATION DATA

Business negotiations – be they face-to-face or electronic – are conducted through communication enabling the declaration of negotiation objectives and active implementation of negotiation strategies to achieve pre-defined goals and the declaration of a successful or unsuccessful end of the negotiation. The processing of exchanged textual communication enables the automatic transformation of unstructured data into processable structured datasets and subsequently the analysis of textual content without losing the data richness of exchanged communication messages. For this purpose, the paper presents Text Mining-based pre-processing approaches and dimensionality reduction algorithms from Feature Extraction and Feature Selection in a research framework and evaluates those to counteract common dimensionality problems with textual processing. In doing so, the maintenance of data richness in communication data is considered as the overall goal to determine the dataset with minimal information loss. In this sense, various pre-processed and transformed communication datasets derived from dimensionality reduction are integrated as input data into selected classification models to measure the prediction performance regarding the final negotiation outcome with ROC analysis. The central results of the ROC show that quantified business communication generated by Optimized Selection delivers the best data based on Lovins’ stemming algorithm compared to stemming variations of Forward Selection and SVD

An Evaluation of the Need and Cost of Selected Trade Facilitation Measures in Bangladesh: Implications for the WTO Negotiations on Trade Facilitation

With the ongoing customs reforms in Bangladesh, the possible future negotiations on trade facilitation in the WTO will have a profound impact on Bangladesh, as well as on other LDC and developing countries. These countries will benefit greatly from new trade facilitation initiatives. Simultaneously, these countries may face enormous challenges in implementing their commitments in the area of trade facilitation. It is, thus, imperative for these countries to closely monitor the Doha negotiations in this area and be prepared to formulate their negotiating strategies. They should also continue with customs administration reform and trade facilitation capacity building programs in order to develop their own capacity.WTO, Trade Facilitation, Bangladesh

Choosing between Auctions and Negotiations in Online B2B Markets for IT Services: The Effect of Prior Relationships and Performance

The choice of contract allocation mechanism in procurement affects such aspects of transactions as information exchange between buyer and supplier, supplier competition, pricing and, eventually, performance. In this study we investigate the buyer’s choice between reverse auctions and bilateral negotiations as an allocation mechanism for IT services contracts. Prior studies into allocation mechanism choice focused on factors pertaining to discrete exchange situation, such as con-tract complexity or availability of suppliers. We broaden the research by focusing on buyers’ past exchange relationships with vendors. Based on the literature on the economics of contracting and agency theory, we hypothesize that prior re-peat interaction with vendors favors the use of negotiations over auctions in the next transaction, while the need to explore the marketplace due to buyer’s inexperience or dissatisfaction with vendor’s performance in the most recent project leads to the use of auctions instead of negotiations. We find support for these hypotheses in a longitudinal dataset of 2,081 IT projects realized by 91 repeat buyers at a leading online services marketplace over a period of eight years. Taken together, the results show that analyzing B2B auctions and negotiations should move beyond analyzing discrete instances and instead analyze them in the context of the individual firm’s history and supplier strategy.outsourcing;IT services;online marketplace;reverse auctions

Intelligent Agents - a Tool for Modeling Intermediation and Negotiation Processes

Many contemporary problems as encountered in society and economy require advanced capabilities for evaluation of situations and alternatives and decision making, most of the time requiring intervention of human agents, experts in negotiation and intermediation. Moreover, many problems require the application of standard procedures and activities to carry out typical socio-economic processes (for example by employing standard auctions for procurement or supply of goods or convenient intermediation to access resources and information). This paper focuses on enhancing knowledge about intermediation and negotiation processes in order to improve quality of services and optimize performances of business agents, using new computational methods that combine formal methods with intelligent agents paradigm. Taking into account their modularity and extensibility, agent systems allow facile, standardized and seamless integration of negotiation protocols and strategies by employing declarative and formal representations specific to computer science.Business processes, Intelligent Agents, Intermediation and Negotiation, Formal Models.