The advent of business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce market has created needs and opportunities for firms to negotiate deals online. Most negotiation support systems (NSS) in past research are text-based and the related findings could not be generalized to negotiating situations utilizing advanced electronic communication technology. This paper investigates the impact of NSS and conflict level on negotiation outcomes where participants communicated through a videoconferencing channel. Findings suggested that dyads with videoconferencing NSS support achieved higher joint outcome, but spent more time in reaching agreements - in low but not high conflict negotiation situation. Conclusion and implications were drawn.

Recently, there has been increasing interest in the application of information processing technologies such as GSS to the field of negotiations. This paper explores the theoretical and practical integration of principled negotiation, the ESD framework, and the MeetingWorks GSS in supporting negotiation processes. Recent developments in nego-tiation theory and practice have identified “principled negotiation” as an improved way of resolving disputes. Evolutionary Systems Design (ESD) is a widely-used formal modeling framework for task-oriented group processes including group decision making, planning, policy making, and ne-gotiation. MeetingWorks is a comprehensive group support system (GSS) that provides a variety of tools to assist task-oriented groups.