Strategies for offer generation and relaxation in fuzzy constraint-based negotiation models

Ministerio de Educación y Cienci

Challenges of business negotiation communications between Finnish and Eastern European companies: a comparative study of ICT and agriculture sectors

The importance of cross-cultural differences in modern international business interactions is believed to be one of the topical issues among the academics and practitioners. The present research is an attempt to analyse communications between Finnish managers and Eastern Europeans representing rather dissimilar business cultures. The challenges which Finnish companies face while interacting with their partners and customers from Poland, Russia and Ukraine are described on the examples of three companies. These companies represent both small and big business and limited to ICT and agriculture industries. Five managers were interviewed. The study reveals that business culture is in many respects industry-specific. However, challenges in business communications between different cultures besides being specific in ICT and agriculture sectors are mostly rather similar in both spheres. It has been argued that the main difficulties impeding business communications of the parties are language barrier, relationship building and trust creation processes, dissimilar attitudes to long-term planning, information sharing and complexity of hierarchical decision-making. Careful work on the agreements, comprehension of negative feedback, excessive reasoning required and getting over distributive win-lose approach are also the items from the list of challenges. The major ways to overcome the challenges are careful relationship creation based on openness, honesty and trust. Enough time should be devoted to this process as the significance of good relationships with Eastern European partners cannot be overestimated. Several evidences of developing character of business culture as well as European business cultures convergence have been obtained as well as generation-specific nature of business communications. The meaning of the cultural intelligence of the interacting managers is discussed

Negotiating flexible agreements by combining distributive and integrative negotiation

This paper presents an approach to automated negotiation between agents which attempts to combine the advantages of a co-operative value adding approach, with the reality that negotiating agents are also competing. We use the concept of a trusted mediator to facilitate openness regarding what one values, without disadvantaging oneself by revealing sensitive information (such as a reserve price) to the other party. Social science and management literature deals with negotiation between people, and so can be both more complex, and less well defined than automated negotiation between software agents. We take inspiration from the social science literature and develop a computational framework to support negotiating software agents. The framework includes recognition that agents are self interested, and therefore will manipulate the system to their advantage if possible. We include mechanisms to discourage this kind of manipulation in the form of a transaction cost associated with making only small concessions, and a bias in dividing the pie which is the gain from trade which favours the agent who is most 'honest' in making offers