eNegotiations: Towards Engineering of Technology Based Social Processes

Traditionally, negotiation support was based on normative and prescriptive research; its users were analysts and experts. The purpose of the recently developed e-negotiation systems is to provide negotiators with services and to satisfy their requirements rather than direct their activities so that they conform to rationality and optimality principles. This orientation is typical to software engineering. Due to the difficulties in reconciling results of prescriptive and descriptive studies the e-negotiation design specifications are often based on selected descriptive approaches at the expense of the prescriptive support. This paper presents selected results from negotiation and e-negotiation research and discusses methodological foundations for e-negotiation system design and development. Based on review of methodological foundations and the scientific and engineering perspectives on negotiations, an e-negotiation view integration model is proposed. The purpose of the model is to allow for the integration of behavioural, scientific and engineering views on e-negotiations

Negotiation Support Systems and Software Agents in E-Business Negotiations

Experiments with negotiation software agents’ in frictionless commerce indicate potential for destructive behaviour. Most of the agents are capable of engaging in auctions and have no ability to conduct complex business negotiations. Recognizing that people and software agents operate in different although overlapping spheres we propose an environment in which negotiation and decision support systems work together with software agents in electronic negotiations. Based on our experiences with the Inspire system we constructed an environment comprising software agents, and negotiation and decision support systems. One agent monitors the process, facilitates the use of Inspire, interprets the negotiators’ activities and provides methodological advice. The architecture of this environment is based on the separation of user support functions from the autonomous software activities, separation of the support for individuals from facilitation and mediation; and scalability and the ability to provide linkages with the existing software

Human-Agent Negotiations: The Impact Agents’ Concession Schedule and Task Complexity on Agreements

Employment of software agents for conducting negotiations with online customers promises to increase the flexibility and reach of the exchange mechanism and reduce transaction costs. Past research had suggested different negotiation tactics for the agents, and had used them in experimental settings against human negotiators. This work explores the interaction between negotiation strategies and the complexity of the negotiation task as represented by the number of negotiation issues. Including more issues in a negotiation potentially allows the parties more space to maneuver and, thus, promises higher likelihood of agreement. In practice, the consideration of more issues requires higher cognitive effort, which could have a negative effect on reaching an agreement. The results of human–agent negotiation experiments conducted at a major Canadian university revealed that there is an interaction between chosen strategy and task complexity. Also, when competitive strategy was employed, the agents\u27 utility was the highest. Because competitive strategy resulted in fewer agreements the average utility per agent was the highest in the compromising–competitive strategy

The Effects of Culture in Computer-Mediated Negotiations

The paper explores the impact of culture on anonymous inter- and intracultural negotiations conducted via the Internet using a Web-based negotiation support system (NSS). In e-negotiations, technology acts as a moderator in the relationship between culture and negotiation behavior. This implies that patterns of cultural impact on negotiations can be different from face-to-face negotiations. Communication technology reduces the transmission of social cues and increases the importance of explicit communication. Thus, cultural dimensions such as power distance, which rely on social cues, are reduced in their impact, while the impact of communication-related dimensions of cultures such as high vs. low context is amplified by the system. The empirical analysis of these effects is based on a set of bilateral negotiations involving 1366 participants carried out with the Web-based NSS Inspire. It indicates a significant influence of culture, particularly regarding negotiators’ expectations. We also found significant cultural differences with regard to communication patterns emerging during the negotiation process and outcomes of negotiations. Our results also indicate that as the negotiation process progresses, individual differences between negotiators, including their approach to problem solving, become more important than their cultural characteristics

06461 Abstracts Collection -- Negotiation and Market Engineering

From 12.11.06 to 17.11.06, the Dagstuhl Seminar 06461 ``Negotiation and Market Engineering\u27\u27 was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of seminar results and ideas are put together in this paper. The first section describes the seminar topics and goals in general. Links to extended abstracts or full papers are provided, if available

Procurement Auctions and Negotiations: An Empirical Comparison

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis Group in Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce on Aug. 2, 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/10919392.2017.1363576.Real world procurement transactions often involve multiple attributes and multiple vendors. Successful procurement involves vendor selection through appropriate market mechanisms. The advancement of information technologies has enabled different mechanisms to be applied to similar procurement situations. Advantages and disadvantages of using such mechanisms remain unclear. The presented research compares two types of mechanisms: multi-attribute reverse auctions and multi-attribute multi-bilateral negotiations in e-procurement. Both laboratory and online experiments were carried out to examine their effects on the process, outcomes and suppliers’ assessment. The results show that in procurement, reverse auctions were more efficient than negotiations in terms of the process. Auctions also led to greater gains for the buyers than negotiations but the suppliers’ profit was lower in auctions. The buyer and the winning supplier jointly reached more efficient and balanced contracts in negotiations than in auctions. The results also show that the suppliers’ assessment was affected by their outcomes: the winning suppliers had a more positive assessment towards the process, outcomes and the system. The findings are consistent in both the laboratory and online settings. The implications of this study for practitioners and researchers are discussed

Rational agents, contract curves, and inefficient compromises

Abstract. Several studies of two-party negotiations have shown that negotiators more often than not reach inefficient compromises. We analyze the circumstances under which rational agents make inefficient compromises and refrain from improving them. We do this by describing and interpreting various negotiation situations and by developing formal constructs and theorems for determining the character of a negotiation situation. Key among these concepts is the notion of opposition. Although opposition is defined in terms of utility functions, it is more fundamental in the sense that it is more intuitive to decision makers and can be used in contexts in which the parties' utilities are unknown or are partially known. The effects of various rationality assumptions on efficiency and their implications for negotiation support systems are discussed. We argue that the prescriptive/descriptive approach advocated by negotiation analysts lacks sufficient explanatory powers to be effectively used in negotiation support and that negotiation support systems should not constrain the parties to the set of efficient points

The effects of culture in anonymous negotiations: Experiment in four countries

Abstrac

The effects of culture in anonymous negotiations: Experiment in four countries

Abstrac