Understanding decision quality through satisfaction

"PAAMS 2014 International Workshops, Salamanca, Spain, June 4-6, 2014. Proceedings"One of the most important factors to determine the success of an or-ganization is the quality of decisions made. In order to improve the decisions taken and to strengthen the competitiveness of organizations, systems such as Group Decision Support Systems (GDSSs) have been strongly developed and studied in recent decades. The amount of GDSSs incorporating automatic nego-tiation mechanisms, such as argumentation, is increasing nowadays. The evalu-ation of these mechanisms and the understanding of their real benefits for the organizations is still a hard challenge. In this article, we propose a model that allows a GDSS to measure the participant’s satisfaction with the decision, con-sidering aspects such as problem evaluation, personality, emotions and expecta-tions. This model is intended to enable the understanding of the decision’s qual-ity achieved with an argumentation system and to evaluate its capability to po-tentiate the decision’s quality. The proposed model validates all the assump-tions found in the literature regarding the participant’s satisfaction.This work is supported by FEDER Funds through the “Programa Operacional Fac-tores de Competitividade - COMPETE” program and by National Funds through FCT “Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia” under the project: FCOMP-01-0124-FEDER-PEst-OE/EEI/UI0760/2011 and SFRH/BD/89697/2012

Listening Project

In an effort to better serve Southeast and Coastal Georgia, The Coastal Rivers Water Planning & Policy Center tapped the thoughts of several key stakeholders on water issues in our region.The Center was created in 2001 with a continuing mission to "assist policymakers in the formulation of policy designs to best manage sustainable economic growth and natural resource conservation via water planning, research, education and technical assistance." In order to best accomplish this mission, it is necessary for us to engage stakeholders in our region to determine those issues of critical importance.The Listening Project is designed to identify the perspective of water users throughout the Coastal Rivers Region by listening to the actual concerns and ideas for improvement of those who have a stake in the water future of the region. Using this information, the Center can better meet the research needs of stakeholders in the region.The objective of the first round of listening sessions is to identify issues, and not to take a quantitative measure of any given constituency. Thus, the results of the process do not lend themselves to conclusions that any one constituency has a certain viewpoint, but rather gives an idea for the type of issues that arise when representatives of one particular constituency gather to discuss their hopes and fears around the future of water use in Coastal Georgia region.The balance of this paper is organized in the following way: In Section II we discuss the process used in this first round of five listening sessions. In Section III we report the verbatim ideas of the participants in each of the five sessions. Section IV reports the same verbatim ideas put forward by the participants, but the ideas are organized according to dominant themes emerging from the sessions, where various constituencies' ideas on each theme are easily readable in the same place. Finally, in Section V we offer concluding remarks and describe our plans for Phase II of the project. Working Paper Number 2005-00

State of New York Public Employment Relations Board Decisions from June 15, 1978

6_21_1979_PERB_BD_DecisionsOCR.pdf: 92 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

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

State of New York Public Employment Relations Board Decisions from February 3, 1981

2_3_1981_PERB_BD_DecisionsOCR.pdf: 79 downloads, before Oct. 1, 2020

Chronicling the Complexification of Negotiation Theory and Practice

The essay reviews the content of twenty-five years of the Harvard Program on Negotiation\u27s Negotiation Journal, identifying themes and issues explored on its pages in the past, the current issues challenging the field’s scholars and practitioners, and the issues likely to confront us in the future. It argues that while we in the field hoped for simple, elegant, and universal theories of negotiation and conflict resolution, the last twenty-five years have demonstrated the increasing complexification of negotiation theory and practice, from increased numbers of parties and issues, and dilemmas of intertemporal commitments, ethics, accountability, and relationships of private action to public responsibility

Assessing Consensus: The Promise and Performance of Negotiated Rulemaking

Negotiated rulemaking appears by most accounts to have come of age. A procedure that once seemed confined to discussion among administrative law scholars has in the past decade captured the attention of policymakers throughout the nation\u27s capital. Congress officially endorsed regulatory negotiation in the Negotiated Rulemaking Act of 1990, and it permanently reauthorized the Act in 1996. Over the past few years, the executive branch has visibly supported regulatory negotiation, both through the Clinton administration\u27s National Performance Review (NPR) and through specific presidential directives to agency heads. Congress has also begun to mandate the use of negotiated rulemaking by certain agencies in the development of specific regulations. As a result of these and other efforts, federal agencies have begun to employ the consensus-based process known as negotiated rulemaking

The effect of cost information on buyer-supplier negotiations in different power settings.

buyer-supplier negotiations; cost information;

Assessing Consensus: The Promise and Performance of Negotiated Rulemaking

Negotiated rulemaking appears by most accounts to have come of age. A procedure that once seemed confined to discussion among administrative law scholars has in the past decade captured the attention of policymakers throughout the nation\u27s capital. Congress officially endorsed regulatory negotiation in the Negotiated Rulemaking Act of 1990, and it permanently reauthorized the Act in 1996. Over the past few years, the executive branch has visibly supported regulatory negotiation, both through the Clinton administration\u27s National Performance Review (NPR) and through specific presidential directives to agency heads. Congress has also begun to mandate the use of negotiated rulemaking by certain agencies in the development of specific regulations. As a result of these and other efforts, federal agencies have begun to employ the consensus-based process known as negotiated rulemaking