Tax aggressiveness and negotiations: A conceptual paper

Negotiation is a pervasive feature of relationships among auditor-clients, buyer-sellers, as well as being a part of tax audits.Various forms of negotiations occur between the taxpayer and the tax authorities but nothing is mentioned in the literatures on the processes and procedures of how both parties arrive at a settlement that is amicable to both parties.This study reviews the literature on how concession timing negotiation strategies adopted by the tax authorities and the tax practitioners’ aggressiveness impact negotiation outcomes

Three Studies on Multi-attribute Market Mechanisms in E-procurement

Successful e-procurement depends on selecting the appropriate mechanisms that comprise rules governing and facilitating transaction process. Existing mechanisms have theoretical or practical limitations such as limited number of attributes, disclosure of buyer’s preferences and costly processes. The present research addresses these issues through three studies. Study 1 presents two feasible mechanisms for multi-attribute multi-supplier transactions. They allow buyers to control preference representation and information revelation, assuring that suppliers obtain sufficient information in making effective proposals while protecting confidential information. Following the design-science approach, the mechanisms are implemented to support multi-attribute reverse auctions and multi-bilateral negotiations. Study 2 examines the revelation of information in multi-attribute reverse auctions. Three revelation rules are formulated with admissible bids, winning bids and all bidders’ bids. Their effects on the process, outcomes and bidders’ assessment are tested in two experiments. The results show significant improvement in process efficiency when more information is revealed. The suppliers reached better outcomes with either admissible bids only or all bidders’ bids, while the buyers gained more when revealing the winning bids only. Bidders were more satisfied with the outcomes and system when more information was provided. Study 3 compares multi-attribute reverse auctions and multi-bilateral negotiations in both laboratory and online experiments. The results show that auctions are more efficient than negotiations in terms of the process. Auctions led to greater gains for the buyers, whereas more balanced contracts were reached in negotiations. Suppliers’ assessment was affected by their outcomes, and the winning suppliers were more satisfied with the process, outcomes and system. The buyer’s role was also examined. Different types of information conveyed from buyer influence suppliers’ behavior in making bids/offers and concessions, which in turn affected buyer’s gains. This research provides implications to future studies and practices in e-procurement, in particular, the formulation of a procedure of two multi-attribute mechanisms and the formulation of general guidelines for strategic use of different mechanisms in various e-procurement contexts

Using Similarity Criteria to Make Negotiation Trade-Offs

This paper addresses the issues involved in software agents making trade-offs during automated negotiations in which they have information uncertainty and resource limitations. In particular, the importance of being able to make trade-offs in real-world applications is highlighted and a novel algorithm for performing trade-offs for multi-dimensional goods is developed. The algorithm uses the notion of fuzzy similarity in order to find negotiation solutions that are beneficial to both parties. Empirical results indicate the benefits and effectiveness of the trade-off algorithm in a range of negotiation situations

Combinatorial Auction-based Mechanisms for Composite Web Service Selection

Composite service selection presents the opportunity for the rapid development of complex applications using existing web services. It refers to the problem of selecting a set of web services from a large pool of available candidates to logically compose them to achieve value-added composite services. The aim of service selection is to choose the best set of services based on the functional and non-functional (quality related) requirements of a composite service requester. The current service selection approaches mostly assume that web services are offered as single independent entities; there is no possibility for bundling. Moreover, the current research has mainly focused on solving the problem for a single composite service. There is a limited research to date on how the presence of multiple requests for composite services affects the performance of service selection approaches. Addressing these two aspects can significantly enhance the application of composite service selection approaches in the real-world. We develop new approaches for the composite web service selection problem by addressing both the bundling and multiple requests issues. In particular, we propose two mechanisms based on combinatorial auction models, where the provisioning of multiple services are auctioned simultaneously and service providers can bid to offer combinations of web services. We mapped these mechanisms to Integer Linear Programing models and conducted extensive simulations to evaluate them. The results of our experimentation show that bundling can lead to cost reductions compared to when services are offered independently. Moreover, the simultaneous consideration of a set of requests enhances the success rate of the mechanism in allocating services to requests. By considering all composite service requests at the same time, the mechanism achieves more homogenous prices which can be a determining factor for the service requester in choosing the best composite service selection mechanism to deploy

Negotiation and the Web: Users' Perception and Acceptance

New information technologies invariably provide excellent opportunities for improving the efficiency and effectiveness of decision making and negotiation through the development of novel decision support techniques. Emerging Internet related technologies and, in particular, the World Wide Web provide yet another opportunity for radical change and improvement in the support and practice of negotiations. This view is supported by the results of a cross-cultural experiment that we have been conducting over the past year as part of the InterNeg project, observing computer-assisted international negotiations over the Web. One of the surprises from this experiment is the degree of acceptance that the Web/computer technology achieved among a user base comprising both experienced negotiators and students. In this paper we report our experimental results and suggest the reasons behind and requirements for successful acceptance of Web based negotiation support technology, with the aim of stimulating further exploration of the opportunities held out by these new technologies

Bargaining in Supply Chains (Long Version)

We study experimentally bargaining in a multiple-tier supply chain with horizontal competition and sequential bargaining between tiers. Our treatments vary the cost differences between firms in tiers 1 and 2. We measure how these underlying costs influence the efficiency, negotiated prices and profit distribution across the supply chain, and the consistency of these outcomes with existing theory. We find that the structural issue of cost differentials dominates personal characteristics in explaining outcomes, with profits in a tier generally increasing with decreased competition in the tier and increasing with decreased competition in alternate tiers. The Balanced Principal model of supply chain bargaining does a good job explaining our data, and outperforms the common assumption of leader-follower negotiations. We find a significant anchoring effect from a firm's first bid but no effect of the sequence of those bids, no evidence of failure to close via escalation of commitment, and mixed results for a deadline effect. We also find an interesting asymmetry between the buy and sells sides in employed bidding strategy. The buy side makes predominantly concessionary offers after the initial anchor, but a significant number of sell side firms engage in aggressive anti-concessionary bidding, a strategy that is effective in that it increases prices while not compromising closure rates.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109717/1/1259_Lovejoy.pdfhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/109717/4/1259_Lovejoy_Mar2015.pdfDescription of 1259_Lovejoy_Mar2015.pdf : Long Version March 201

Sunk cost accounting and entrapment in corporate acquisitions and financial markets : an experimental analysis

Sunk cost accounting refers to the empirical finding that individuals tend to let their decisions be influenced by costs made at an earlier time in such a way that they are more risk seeking than they would be had they not incurred these costs. Such behaviour violates the axioms of economic theory which states individuals should only consider incremental costs and benefits when executing investments. This dissertation is concerned whether the pervasive sunk cost phenomenon extends to corporate acquisitions and financial markets. 122 students from the University of St Andrews participated in three experiments exploring the use of sunk costs in interactive negotiation contexts and financial markets. Experiment I elucidates that subjects value the sunk cost issue higher than other issues in a multi-issue negotiation. Experiment II illustrates that bidders are influenced by the sunk costs of competing bidders in a first price, sealed-bid, common-value auction. In financial markets their exists an analogous concept to sunk cost accounting known as the disposition effect. This explains the tendency of investors to sell “winning” stocks and hold “losing” stocks. Experiment III demonstrates that trading strategies in an experimental equity market are influenced by a pre-trading brokerage cost. Not only are subjects influenced in the direction that reduces the disposition effect but also trading is diminished. Without the brokerage cost there was a significant disposition effect. JEL-Classifications C70, C90, D44, D80, D81, G1

HIV/AIDS Pandemic in Africa: Trends and Challenges

Three-quarters of the world’s AIDS population lives in Sub-Saharan Africa; most have no access to lifesaving drugs, testing facilities or even basic preventative health care. One of the major factors inhibiting medical professionals in Africa from treating this disease is the inability to access vast areas of the continent with adequately equipped medical facilities. To meet this need, Architecture for Humanity challenged the world’s architects and health care professionals to submit designs for a mobile HIV/AIDS health clinic. The pandemic is changing the demographic structure of Africa and wiping out life expectancy gains. Indeed, in many African countries, life expectancy is dropping from more than 60 years to around 45 years or even less. In this paper, we highlight the uniqueness of factors associated with HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa and present its impact and challenges.HIV/AIDS, Africa

THE EFFECTS OF ISSUE LINKAGE ON STATE BARGAINING STRATEGIES: INSTITUTIONAL CONDITIONS FOR COOPERATIVE AND NON-COOPERATIVE BARGAINING

This project addresses the relationship between institutional design and cooperation in international bargaining. In particular, it addresses the question of how the institutional structure within which states bargain impacts states' decisions to adopt cooperative, rather than non-cooperative, bargaining strategies. The project draws on the issue linkage literature to analyze one central feature of institutional bargaining structure, "offsetting distributional patterns." When states place importance on different issues included in a bargain and their relative valuation of these issues becomes more disparate, distributional patterns are said to be more "offsetting." In such circumstances, states are more likely to adopt cooperative, rather than zero-sum, bargaining strategies. This relationship exists even if, on each issue, states have antithetical interests. The linkage of issues with more offsetting distributional patterns serves to transform the zero-sum game on each issue into a positive-sum game of linked issues. To build this theoretical argument, the project draws on an abstract, formalized logic analyzing two players bargaining over two issues. It demonstrates that the more offsetting are the distributional patterns of the linked issues, the more likely players are to truthfully reveal their interests - an important step which facilitates the adoption of cooperative bargaining strategies in the incomplete information setting that characterizes much international bargaining. Combined with the incentives created by the issue linkage structure, truthful revelation leads states to adopt cooperative, rather than non-cooperative, bargaining strategies. To empirically test this argument, the project first presents empirical measurement rules for the central variables of interest. Interview evidence with state representatives in the European Union is coded using these rules to construct a large-N dataset on which MLE analyses are conducted to test the central hypothesis relating issue linkage and offsetting distributional patterns to states' adoption of cooperative bargaining strategies. The interview evidence is then employed to construct in-depth case studies to highlight the hypothesized causal mechanisms and observable implications of the theoretical argument. Both the statistical results from the MLE analysis and empirical evidence from the case studies serve to support the project's central hypothesis