Modeling Business Negotiations for Electronic Commerce

E-commerce "localizes global markets" by opening remote markets to retail and to small companies. Newly developed E-commerce tools allow individual and organizational buyers to search for suppliers anywhere and make deals electronically. We propose a software agent that interacts with a buyer and elicits information about the criteria, preferences, and limitations, and that conducts business negotiation on behalf of the buyer. The agent has been implemented and tested in Negoplan, a software system that supports the simulation of decision processes. Results of several negotiation simulations are presented

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 Via the World Wide Web: A Cross-Cultural Study of Decision Making

INSPIRE is a Web-based system for the support and conduct of negotiation. The primary uses of the system are training and research. Between July 1996 and April 1997, 281 bilateral negotiations were conducted through the system by managers, engineers, and students from over 50 countries. INSPIRE has been used at eight universities and training centers. In research it is being used to study cross-cultural differences in decision making and the use of computer support in negotiation. This paper outlines the system, the negotiation methodology embedded in it, and reports the initial results of the experimental study of the impact of culture on Web-based bilateral negotiation

Negotiating Inefficient Compromises: Is Less Better than More?

Significant efforts are made to design and implement decision and negotiation support systems to identify efficient alternatives. The underlying assumption is that decision-makers prefer an efficient alternative over an inefficient one. Experimental studies indicate that people often accept inefficient compromises and are unwilling to improve them even if prompted to do so. This report presents preliminary results for the analysis of 605 bilateral negotiations in which only 20.8% of negotiators who achieved an inefficient compromise entered the post-settlement phase in an attempt to improve the compromise

Rational Agents, Contract Curves, and Inefficient Compromises Report

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 the 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

Learning Business Negotiations with Web-based Systems: The Case of IIMB

Access to, and the ability to use computer and communication technologies varies widely between countries. It is often lack of proficiency rather than access that creates the barriers between developed and developing countries. The interNeg Web site and its online system INSPIRE and INSS, aim at overcoming these barriers by educating people around the world about decision and negotiation analysis and providing them with an opportunity to use decision support techniques. The systems allow one to conduct simulated negotiations with people from different cultures and solve realistic managerial decision problems. In this paper we present and discuss the limitations of the prevailing methods for teaching decision making and negotiation and present a technological solution that is Internet-based. We present our experiences with using our Web-based decision and negotiation support systems in executive training programs at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIMB). The discussion of extension to the presented methods and their use in higher education in developing countries concludes the paper

The Effects of Culture in Anonymous Negotiations: A Four Countries Experiment

Experimental research on cross-cultural negotiations typically involves subjects negotiating in a classroom or laboratory setting. Such negotiations are brief, with a strictly imposed deadline and face-to-face. Further, the negotiations typically involve dyads from the same country. The comparisons are done on the basis of experiments replicated in several countries. Internet technologies allow for communication across the cultural frontiers. While the communication is not as rich as in the case of face-to-face discussions, it allows subjects to negotiate in an asynchronous mode and at their own pace. It is also possible to conduct anonymous negotiations for several weeks. This paper explores the implications of culture on anonymous negotiations conducted via the Web with use of INSPIRE, a Web-based negotiation support system. The negotiations involved 166 subjects from Austria, Ecuador, Finland, and Switzerland. A model to study cross-cultural negotiations is proposed and assessed based on the statistical analysis of negotiations

Using an Ellipsoid Model to Track and Predict the Evolution and Propagation of Coronal Mass Ejections

We present a method for tracking and predicting the propagation and evolution of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) using the imagers on the STEREO and SOHO satellites. By empirically modeling the material between the inner core and leading edge of a CME as an expanding, outward propagating ellipsoid, we track its evolution in three-dimensional space. Though more complex empirical CME models have been developed, we examine the accuracy of this relatively simple geometric model, which incorporates relatively few physical assumptions, including i) a constant propagation angle and ii) an azimuthally symmetric structure. Testing our ellipsoid model developed herein on three separate CMEs, we find that it is an effective tool for predicting the arrival of density enhancements and the duration of each event near 1 AU. For each CME studied, the trends in the trajectory, as well as the radial and transverse expansion are studied from 0 to ~.3 AU to create predictions at 1 AU with an average accuracy of 2.9 hours.Comment: 18 pages, 11 figure

Search for direct production of charginos and neutralinos in events with three leptons and missing transverse momentum in √s = 7 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for the direct production of charginos and neutralinos in final states with three electrons or muons and missing transverse momentum is presented. The analysis is based on 4.7 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data delivered by the Large Hadron Collider and recorded with the ATLAS detector. Observations are consistent with Standard Model expectations in three signal regions that are either depleted or enriched in Z-boson decays. Upper limits at 95% confidence level are set in R-parity conserving phenomenological minimal supersymmetric models and in simplified models, significantly extending previous results

Jet size dependence of single jet suppression in lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s(NN)) = 2.76 TeV with the ATLAS detector at the LHC

Measurements of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions at the LHC provide direct sensitivity to the physics of jet quenching. In a sample of lead-lead collisions at sqrt(s) = 2.76 TeV corresponding to an integrated luminosity of approximately 7 inverse microbarns, ATLAS has measured jets with a calorimeter over the pseudorapidity interval |eta| < 2.1 and over the transverse momentum range 38 < pT < 210 GeV. Jets were reconstructed using the anti-kt algorithm with values for the distance parameter that determines the nominal jet radius of R = 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 and 0.5. The centrality dependence of the jet yield is characterized by the jet "central-to-peripheral ratio," Rcp. Jet production is found to be suppressed by approximately a factor of two in the 10% most central collisions relative to peripheral collisions. Rcp varies smoothly with centrality as characterized by the number of participating nucleons. The observed suppression is only weakly dependent on jet radius and transverse momentum. These results provide the first direct measurement of inclusive jet suppression in heavy ion collisions and complement previous measurements of dijet transverse energy imbalance at the LHC.Comment: 15 pages plus author list (30 pages total), 8 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Physics Letters B. All figures including auxiliary figures are available at http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/GROUPS/PHYSICS/PAPERS/HION-2011-02