Curious Negotiator

n negotiation the exchange of information is as important as the exchange of offers. The curious negotiator is a multiagent system with three types of agents. Two negotiation agents, each representing an individual, develop consecutive offers, supported by information, whilst requesting information from its opponent. A mediator agent, with experience of prior negotiations, suggests how the negotiation may develop. A failed negotiation is a missed opportunity. An observer agent analyses failures looking for new opportunities. The integration of negotiation theory and data mining enables the curious negotiator to discover and exploit negotiation opportunities. Trials will be conducted in electronic business

INTEGRATING KANSEI ENGINEERING AND CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT TO IMPROVE SERVICE QUALITY: A CASE STUDY AT SHOPPING MALL IN SURABAYA

With respect to customer dynamics in experiencing products and services, nowadays, customers tend to highly demand hedonism, pleasure and individuality rather than functionality and usability. In other words, they look for a service that offers more values (both physically and emotionally) from its function. Apart from that, it is a must for a company to strive for achieving customer loyalty. Thus, this study proposes an integrative framework of Kansei Engineering (KE) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) in services. It aims to explore the customer emotional needs (Kansei in Japanese) experienced and encountered in services. As emphasized in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) concept, understanding the customer emotional needs is one of successful keys for CRM implementation. In order to analyze the applicability of the proposed framework, a case study taken at a brand new elegant shopping mall in Surabaya that involved 100 customers was conducted. Some significant Kansei words as the representatives of customer emotional needs were obtained, such as elegant, believe, cool, wide and curious. These Kansei words have significant correlation with several service attributes, such as: “service given without social status”, “service accuracy”, “responsive employees”, “convenient parking lots”, “attractive events”, and “neat and attractive employees”. Some improvement innitiatives were proposed, including to accelerate the parking lots construction, and to provide a clear directions to the mall access. Theoretically, this study contributes to academic literatures on the relationship between CRM and KE providing in a unified integrated framework. Practically, this research provides a guidance to service managers in collecting and capturing the emotional needs of customers, and investigating what service attributes that are significantly sensitive to the customer emotions. It is, then, to be used as a prioritization tool for continuous improvement or maintenance on service attributes

Dispute Resolution Using Argumentation-Based Mediation

Mediation is a process, in which both parties agree to resolve their dispute by negotiating over alternative solutions presented by a mediator. In order to construct such solutions, mediation brings more information and knowledge, and, if possible, resources to the negotiation table. The contribution of this paper is the automated mediation machinery which does that. It presents an argumentation-based mediation approach that extends the logic-based approach to argumentation-based negotiation involving BDI agents. The paper describes the mediation algorithm. For comparison it illustrates the method with a case study used in an earlier work. It demonstrates how the computational mediator can deal with realistic situations in which the negotiating agents would otherwise fail due to lack of knowledge and/or resources.Comment: 6 page

Professional Employees and Union Democracy: From Control to Chaos

[Excerpt] Much of the research on union democracy and almost all of the press coverage focuses on abuses of power at the top of the organization. I look at a case at the opposite end of the democracy spectrum. After an insurgent challenge to an established executive director toppled him from power, the chaos of democracy was unleashed in this small union of professional workers. The turmoil experienced by this organization for most of the past decade demonstrates that the democracy dilemma in unions cannot be successfully resolved by effective use of the democratic process alone and raises tentative questions about the bottom-up, rank-and-file insurgency approach to union transformation. Section II reviews relevant research on union democracy and the democracy dilemma. Section III looks at attributes of professional workers and the implications for unions that represent them. Section IV summarizes the experiences of the League of Creative Artists, a fictitious name for a real union going through a democracy crisis. The final section offers a brief analysis and suggests possible implications

Institutions and Practices for Restoring and Maintaining Public Order

In the wake of the atrocities committed in Cambodia, southern Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Haiti, many in the international community have called for the creation of ad hoc or standing international criminal courts to deal with some types of international delicts. Courts are indispensable institutions in many domestic criminal and civil systems, and any polity, no matter how structured, must have arrangements, of varying degrees of institutionalization, to apply the law to concrete cases. But lest we fall victim to a judicial romanticism in which we imagine that merely by creating entities we call courts we have solved major problems, we should review the fundamental goals that institutions designed to protect public order seek to fulfill. Goal clarification is especially important when our passions are engaged, as indeed they should be, upon encountering atrocities such as those of Rwanda. Indignation can be a powerful and productive source of political energy, but only if we tap it to stimulate the design of institutions that protect, restore, and improve public order

It’s Complicated: Reflections on Teaching Negotiation for Women

What does it mean to be a woman negotiator? In the two decades that I have been teaching negotiation, I have encountered a wide range of human behavior in the negotiation setting. Individuals run the gamut in terms of their strategies, tactics, worldviews, charisma, perspicacity, flexibility, and other factors that affect negotiation behavior and negotiation outcomes. But one area that negotiation students are always curious about—be they top executives, law students, government employees, lawyers, or doctors—is the role of gender in negotiation. The maddening but intriguing answer to this question is the same as the answer to many other questions about negotiation: it’s complicated. The most important quality of negotiation is its dynamic and fluid nature, each encounter completely unique to its own participants and its own contexts, yet always with the possibility of analysis along a set of identifiable dimensions

Institutions and Practices for Restoring and Maintaining Public Order

The implementation of a copyright protection reform in Sweden in April 2009 suddenly increased the risk of being caught and punished for illegal file sharing. This paper investigates the impact of the reform on illegal file sharing and music sales using a difference-in-differences approach with Norway and Finland as control groups. We find that the reform decreased Internet traffic by 16% and increased music sales by 36% during the first six months. Pirated music therefore seems to be a strong substitute to legal music. However, the reform effects disappeared almost completely after six months, likely because of the weak enforcement of the law

Where We May Oftener Converse Together : Translation of Written and Spoken Communication in Colonial Pennsylvania

In this paper I examine the differences between colonists’ and Indians’ perceptions and use of language in early Pennsylvania. Through consideration of translation challenges in both spoken and written contexts, I conclude that while residents of the region created systems for coping with linguistic issues, basic disparities between native and colonial forms of communication persisted in complicating diplomatic relations. The title of the paper is taken from the August 26, 1758 entry in The Journal of Christian Frederick Post and is part of the Pennsylvanian government’s proposal for closer relations with Indians

Burke and Brexit: the UK’s chief negotiator displays a lack of concern about trade risks and accountability

Ahead of the government’s publication of its negotiating approach to agreeing a future relationship with the EU, the UK’s chief negotiator, David Frost, gave a speech that referenced the work of Edmund Burke. Pippa Catterall argues that Frost distorted Burke’s views, and in doing so displays a shallow and muddled understanding of the risk and uncertainty ahead

A STUDY OF NEGOTIATIONS WITHIN THE ETHNIC CHINESE COMMUNITY BETWEEN TAIWAN AND HONG KONG

Negotiation is a fundamental process of business activity. As the world becomes more globalized and international business negotiation becomes more frequent, the importance of culture in negotiation becomes more and more salient. The majority of previous negotiation research has been conducted in either a western or an east vs. west environment, leading us to wonder if the findings of these studies are applicable in other cross-cultural contexts. This study uses the dual concern model presented by Blake and Mouton (1985) to understand what drives negotiation strategy selection in two similar cultures (Taiwan and Hong Kong). The result of statistical analysis confirm significant differences in negotiation strategies between the countries: subjects in Hong Kong are more inclined to employ integration negotiation strategies while Taiwanese subjects employ more competitive strategies.Conflict Management, Negotiation, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Dual Concern Model.