Resolving Multi-party Privacy Conflicts in Social Media

Items shared through Social Media may affect more than one user's privacy --- e.g., photos that depict multiple users, comments that mention multiple users, events in which multiple users are invited, etc. The lack of multi-party privacy management support in current mainstream Social Media infrastructures makes users unable to appropriately control to whom these items are actually shared or not. Computational mechanisms that are able to merge the privacy preferences of multiple users into a single policy for an item can help solve this problem. However, merging multiple users' privacy preferences is not an easy task, because privacy preferences may conflict, so methods to resolve conflicts are needed. Moreover, these methods need to consider how users' would actually reach an agreement about a solution to the conflict in order to propose solutions that can be acceptable by all of the users affected by the item to be shared. Current approaches are either too demanding or only consider fixed ways of aggregating privacy preferences. In this paper, we propose the first computational mechanism to resolve conflicts for multi-party privacy management in Social Media that is able to adapt to different situations by modelling the concessions that users make to reach a solution to the conflicts. We also present results of a user study in which our proposed mechanism outperformed other existing approaches in terms of how many times each approach matched users' behaviour.Comment: Authors' version of the paper accepted for publication at IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, 201

AUTOMATED TRUST NEGOTIATION USING CRYPTOGRAPHIC CREDENTIALS

In automated trust negotiation (ATN), two parties exchange digitally signed credentials that contain attribute information to establish trust and make access control decisions. Because the information in question is often sensitive, credentials are protected according to access control policies. In traditional ATN, credentials are transmitted either in their entirety or not at all. This approach can at times fail unnecessarily, either because a cyclic dependency makes neither negotiator willing to reveal her credential before her opponent, because the opponent must be authorized for all attributes packaged together in a credential to receive any of them, or because it is necessary to fully disclose the attributes, rather than merely proving they satisfy some predicate (such as being over 21 years of age). Recently, several cryptographic credential schemes and associated protocols have been developed to address these and other problems. However, they can be used only as fragments of an ATN process. This paper introduces a framework for ATN in which the diverse credential schemes and protocols can be combined, integrated, and used as needed. A policy language is introduced that enables negotiators to specify authorization requirements that must be met by an opponent to receive various amounts of information about certified attributes and the credentials that contain it. The language also supports the use of uncertified attributes, allowing them to be required as part of policy satisfaction, and to place their (automatic) disclosure under policy control

Computer-Supported Negotiations: An Experimental Study of Bargaining in Electronic Commerce

The expanding business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce market has created a need for firms to negotiate business deals online. Negotiation support tools are likely to play a more critical role in B2B e-commerce. Notwithstanding their importance, the impacts of negotiation support tools (especially automated bargaining agents) are not well understood. This research addresses this gap by conducting a series of laboratory experiments to investigate the impact of web-based electronic messaging, web-based negotiation support systems (NSS), and autonomous electronic bargaining agents (EBA) on the outcomes of a multi-issue, e- commerce negotiation. Two types of bargaining situation were investigated: integrative and distributive bargaining. Negotiation outcomes were assessed using joint profit/utility outcome, contract balance, and the closeness to the efficient/Pareto frontier and the Nash bargaining solution. Findings show that web-based NSS can significantly improve efficiency and fairness in remote integrative negotiations but not in distributive negotiations. EBA were found to achieve outcomes comparable to but not significantly better than unassisted human dyads. Implications for NSS and EBA implementation and research were drawn

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

Negotiation Tendencies and Culture: Role of Generations X and Y in Finland, Germany, and Pakistan

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore possible changes in cultural values and in behavior within international business negotiations for generation X and Y members in the three selected countries Finland, Germany, and Pakistan. Methodology – This exploratory study is underlying the critical realism philosophy and follows the deductive approach. This research does not seek generalization. Survey items were adopted from the seminal works by Hofstede and Salacuse and distributed through an online questionnaire via ELomake. The survey yielded in n= 574 responses. Data analysis was conducted with the help of SPSS and SPSS AMOS. After the confirmatory factor analysis, an independent t- test was applied in order to test the dependency between age cohort and cultural values/ negotiation behavior. Findings – Significant differences between generations X and Y were found regarding their cultural values and their behavior within business negotiations. The results further confirm previous studies by showing different negotiation behavior across the three investigated countries. A trend towards a global culture was not confirmed by the results of this study. Research limitations/implications – This empirical study should be repeated with a representative sample from a greater variety of countries. Additionally, generation Z should be in the center of investigation in the near future, since they will enter the job market eventually. Furthermore, qualitative methods like interviews or simulations should be added in order to gain in-depth findings and understand the background of the results. Practical implications – The findings introduce a new source of opportunities but also danger within cross-cultural business negotiations. The results imply that the vital preparation process of a business negotiation needs to concentrate on the negotiator’s age cohort in addition to his/her national culture and further contextual factors. Originality/Value – This research gives advanced insights into cross-cultural negotiations. Due to the research gap within this field of inquiry, this study presents pioneer thoughts on generational-dependent behavior within business negotiations, also regarding cultural values

E-Negotiation systems: A theoretical framework and empirical investigation

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

A deep dive into distributive concession making and the likelihood of impasses in negotiations

Negotiation impasses can have severe negative consequences, but only little research attention has been devoted to investigating their causes. Studies on distributive concession making (i.e., high demands and low concessions) as a cause of impasses were inconclusive due to low sample sizes and methodological choices. Moreover, distributive concession making entails two hitherto fully entangled properties: reduction of conceded value and violation of the reciprocity norm. In our experiment, participants negotiated with a confederate who administered different concession patterns that allowed us to disentangle these properties. We found unambiguous evidence that distributive concession making increases the likelihood of impasses. This effect was driven by the reduction of conceded value rather than the violation of the reciprocity norm. Confrontation with distributive concession making led participants to develop negative internal attributions and anger, which mediated the effect of distributive concession making on the impasse rate. Our study contributes to a better understanding of the causes and underlying mechanisms of negotiation impasses

Cultural Contingencies of Mediation: Effectiveness of Mediation Styles in Intercultural Disputes

The difficulties of intercultural negotiations are well established, yet few studies have examined the factors that facilitate the successful resolution of these disputes. This research took a dynamic approach and examined the types of mediation tactics that are most effective in intercultural disputes given specific disputant characteristics. One-hundred and ten participants from the United States and Turkey negotiated a community-based dispute using a newly developed virtual lab. Dyads were randomly assigned to negotiate with a formulative computer mediator, a manipulative computer mediator, or in an unmediated control condition. As predicted, the results showed a significant interaction between manipulative mediation and dispute difficulty; manipulative mediation produced better objective and subjective outcomes in dyads that reported difficult disputing conditions than in dyads with favorable conditions. The results support the contingency approach using two new indicators of difficult conditions (generalized trust and cultural intelligence)

A multi-demand negotiation model based on fuzzy rules elicited via psychological experiments

This paper proposes a multi-demand negotiation model that takes the effect of human users’ psychological characteristics into consideration. Specifically, in our model each negotiating agent's preference over its demands can be changed, according to human users’ attitudes to risk, patience and regret, during the course of a negotiation. And the change of preference structures is determined by fuzzy logic rules, which are elicited through our psychological experiments. The applicability of our model is illustrated by using our model to solve a problem of political negotiation between two countries. Moreover, we do lots of theoretical and empirical analyses to reveal some insights into our model. In addition, to compare our model with existing ones, we make a survey on fuzzy logic based negotiation, and discuss the similarities and differences between our negotiation model and various consensus models