Automatic Service Agreement Negotiators in Open Commerce Environments

There is a steady shift in e‑commerce from goods to services that must be provisioned according to service agreements. This study focuses on software frameworks to develop automated negotiators in open commerce environments. Analysis of the litera‑ ture on automated negotiation and typical case studies led to a catalog of 16 objective requirements and a conceptual model that was used to compare 11 state-of-the-art software frameworks. None of them was well suited for negotiating service agreements in open commerce environments. This motivated work on a reference architecture that provides the foundations to develop negotiation systems that address the previous requirements. A software framework was devised to validate the proposal by means of case studies. The study contributes to the fields of requirements engineering and software design, and is expected to support future efforts of practitioners and researchers because its findings bridge the gap among the existing automated negotiation techniques and lay the founda‑ tions for developing new software frameworksMinisterio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2006–00472Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2009–07366Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-2533 (Isabel)Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TIN2007–64119Junta de Andalucía P07-TIC-02602Junta de Andalucía P08-TIC-4100Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2008–04718-

Toward a relational concept of uncertainty: about knowing too little, knowing too differently, and accepting not to know

Uncertainty of late has become an increasingly important and controversial topic in water resource management, and natural resources management in general. Diverse managing goals, changing environmental conditions, conflicting interests, and lack of predictability are some of the characteristics that decision makers have to face. This has resulted in the application and development of strategies such as adaptive management, which proposes flexibility and capability to adapt to unknown conditions as a way of dealing with uncertainties. However, this shift in ideas about managing has not always been accompanied by a general shift in the way uncertainties are understood and handled. To improve this situation, we believe it is necessary to recontextualize uncertainty in a broader way¿relative to its role, meaning, and relationship with participants in decision making¿because it is from this understanding that problems and solutions emerge. Under this view, solutions do not exclusively consist of eliminating or reducing uncertainty, but of reframing the problems as such so that they convey a different meaning. To this end, we propose a relational approach to uncertainty analysis. Here, we elaborate on this new conceptualization of uncertainty, and indicate some implications of this view for strategies for dealing with uncertainty in water management. We present an example as an illustration of these concepts. Key words: adaptive management; ambiguity; frames; framing; knowledge relationship; multiple knowledge frames; natural resource management; negotiation; participation; social learning; uncertainty; water managemen

Negotiating with a logical-linguistic protocol in a dialogical framework

This book is the result of years of reflection. Some time ago, while working in commodities, the author felt how difficult it was to decide the order in which to use arguments during a negotiation process. What would happen if we translated the arguments into cards and played them according to the rules of the Bridge game? The results were impressive. There was potential for improvement in the negotiation process. The investigation went deeper, exploring players, cards, deals and the information concealed in the players´ announcements, in the cards and in the deals. This new angle brought the research to NeuroLinguistic Patterns and cryptic languages, such as Russian Cards. In the following pages, the author shares her discovery of a new application for Logical Dialogues: Negotiations, tackled from basic linguistic structures placed under a dialogue form as a cognitive system which ‘understands’ natural language, with the aim to solve conflicts and even to serve peace

J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol

ObjectiveImplementation and scale-up of evidence-based practices (EBPs) is often portrayed as involving multiple stakeholders collaborating harmoniously in the service of a shared vision. In practice, however, collaboration is a more complex process that may involve shared and competing interests and agendas, and negotiation. The present study examined the scale-up of an EBP across an entire service system using the Interagency Collaborative Team (ICT) approach.MethodsParticipants were key stakeholders in a large-scale county-wide implementation of an EBP to reduce child neglect, SafeCare\uc2\uae. Semi-structured interviews and/or focus groups were conducted with 54 individuals representing diverse constituents in the service system, followed by an iterative approach to coding and analysis of transcripts. The study was conceptualized using the Exploration, Preparation, Implementation, and Sustainment (EPIS) framework.ResultsAlthough community stakeholders eventually coalesced around implementation of SafeCare, several challenges affected the implementation process. These challenges included differing organizational cultures, strategies, and approaches to collaboration, competing priorities across levels of leadership, power struggles, and role ambiguity. Each of the factors identified influenced how stakeholders approached the EBP implementation process.ConclusionsSystem wide scale-up of EBPs involves multiple stakeholders operating in a nexus of differing agendas, priorities, leadership styles, and negotiation strategies. The term collaboration may oversimplify the multifaceted nature of the scale-up process. Implementation efforts should openly acknowledge and consider this nexus when individual stakeholders and organizations enter into EBP implementation through collaborative processes.18CE001334/CE/NCIPC CDC HHS/United StatesP30 MH074678/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesP30MH074678/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesR01 MH072961/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesR01 MH092950/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesR01MH072961/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesR01MH092950/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesR21 MH082731/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesR21MH082731/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesR25 MH080916/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United StatesR25MH080916/MH/NIMH NIH HHS/United States2015-03-10T00:00:00Z24611580PMC429443

Addressing climate vulnerability : promoting the participatory rights of indigenous peoples and women through Finnish foreign policy

Julkaistu versi

The Procurement Perspectives of Fruits and Vegetables Supply Chain Planning

Supply chain planning in the fruits and vegetables (FV) supply chains, dealing with short life cycled products in a competitive marketplace, integrates the complex network farmers, food processing and supply to end customers to enhance operations effectiveness

Ontologies to Enable Interoperability of Multi-Agent Electricity Markets Simulation and Decision Support

This paper presents the AiD-EM Ontology, which provides a semantic representation of the concepts required to enable the interoperability between multi-agent-based decision support systems, namely AiD-EM, and the market agents that participate in electricity market simulations. Electricity markets’ constant changes, brought about by the increasing necessity for adequate integration of renewable energy sources, make them complex and dynamic environments with very particular characteristics. Several modeling tools directed at the study and decision support in the scope of the restructured wholesale electricity markets have emerged. However, a common limitation is identified: the lack of interoperability between the various systems. This gap makes it impossible to exchange information and knowledge between them, test different market models, enable players from heterogeneous systems to interact in common market environments, and take full advantage of decision support tools. To overcome this gap, this paper presents the AiD-EM Ontology, which includes the necessary concepts related to the AiD-EM multi-agent decision support system, to enable interoperability with easier cooperation and adequate communication between AiD-EM and simulated market agents wishing to take advantage of this decision support toolThis work has received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under project TradeRES (grant agreement No 864276), from FEDER Funds through COMPETE program and from National Funds through (FCT) under projects CEECIND/01811/2017 and UID/EEA/00760/2019. Gabriel Santos was supported by the PhD grant SFRH/BD/118487/2016 from National Funds through FCTinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The role of leadership in salespeople’s price negotiation behavior

Salespeople assume a key role in defending firms’ price levels in price negotiations with customers. The degree to which salespeople defend prices should critically depend upon their leaders’ influence. However, the influence of leadership on salespeople’s price defense behavior is barely understood, conceptually or empirically. Therefore, building on social learning theory, the authors propose that salespeople might adopt their leaders’ price defense behavior given a transformational leadership style. Furthermore, drawing on the contingency leadership perspective, the authors argue that this adoption fundamentally depends on three variables deduced from the motivation–ability–opportunity (MAO) framework, that is, salespeople’s learning motivation, negotiation efficacy, and perceived customer lenience. Results of a multi-level model using data from 92 salespeople and 264 salesperson–customer interactions confirm these predictions. The first to explore contingencies of salespeople’s adoption of their transformational leaders’ price negotiation behaviors, this study extends marketing theory and provides actionable guidance to practitioners

Bringing social interaction at the core of organizational neuroscience

Organizations are composed of individuals working together for achieving specific goals, and interpersonal dynamics do exert a strong influence on workplace behaviour. Nevertheless, the dual and multiple perspective of interactions has been scarcely considered by Organizational Neuroscience (ON), the emerging field of study that aims at incorporating findings from cognitive and brain sciences into the investigation of organizational behaviour. This perspective article aims to highlight the potential benefits of adopting experimental settings involving two or more participants (the so-called "second person" approach) for studying the neural bases of organizational behaviour. Specifically, we stress the idea that moving beyond the individual perspective and capturing the dynamical relationships occurring within dyads or groups (e.g., leaders and followers, salespersons and clients, teams) might bring novel insights into the rising field of ON. In addition, designing research paradigms that reliably recreate real work and life situations might increase the generalizability and ecological validity of its results. We start with a brief overview of the current state of ON research and we continue by describing the second-person approach to social neuroscience. In the last paragraph, we try and outline how this approach could be extended to ON. To this end, we focus on leadership, group processes and emotional contagion as potential targets of interpersonal ON research