InterNeg Research Papers INR 02/04 With the rapid growth of electronic commerce, there is growing demand and great potential for online negotiation services. However, like other dot.com companies, it is unclear whether e-negotiation services will success by providing real business value and making profit. In this paper we propose a high-level e-negotiation business model and use it to analyze key issues for the success of these services. Specifically, we focus on the value proposition of e-negotiation systems and examine it through surveying potential market segments. While previous literature asses the efficiency and effectiveness of various online negotiations support methods, this exploratory research examines the online negotiation service itself and its potential from business users ’ perspective. Our survey demonstrates that there is a low awareness for e-negotiation services though organizations spend large amounts on negations each year. Moving some of the traditional face to face negotiations to the Internet sphere could reduce the associated costs. In accordance with our assumptions, the benefits of e-negotiations are clear to the surveyed managers and so are the challenges. Most mangers believe that there is a great market potential for online negotiations services and that they will use it in the future as services mature. Based on the survey, we identify critical factors to the success of online negotiation services and suggest some ways to remove the hurdles and create a critical mass of users.

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.

Actor-issue analysis

This paper presents N-Site, a distributed consensus building and negotiation support system, which is used to provide geographically dispersed teams with agile access to a Web-based group decision support system. Four teams located in France, Mexico, the Ukraine, and the United States participated in the N-Site project. Each team was required to research the problem using the World Wide Web (WWW). With this background, each team identified opportunities, threats and alternatives as a basis for developing a response to the Cuban Missile Crisis that confronted President Kennedy in October 1962. The strategic assessment model (SAM) (M. Tavana, J. Multi-Criteria Decision Anal. 11 (2002) 75–96; M. Tavana and S. Banerjee, Decision Sci. 26 (1995) 119–143.) was used by each team to choose a strategy that best fit the team’s perspective. SAM and WWW enabled the teams to evaluate strategic alternatives and build consensus based on a series of intuitive and analytical methods including environmental scanning, the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and subjective probabilities. The WWW was used to achieve interaction among the international teams as they attempted to negotiate a decision framework and select a diplomatic response. The project was assessed with a Web-distributed survey instrument. This use of the WWW has implications for international diplomacy as well as global business.

Agenda 21, the Brudtland Report and other seminal documents discussed earlier in

Semantic Web technologies have recently been maturing to make e-commerce interactions and crossorganizational processes more flexible and automated. Ontology has also been developed in various business domains. However, researches in Semantic Web have largely focused on the facilitation of successful matchmaking but not much on the negotiation upon matchmaking failures and exceptions. In this paper, we propose a novel application of Semantic Web technologies for the facilitation of e-Negotiation processes. We discuss how the elicitation of negotiation issues, alternatives, and tradeoff can be streamlined. We further propose a novel methodology for the elicitation of dependencies among negotiation issues so that negotiators can focus on tradeoff among inter-related issues, instead of arguing about single issues. A negotiation plan can thus be derived to observe negotiation orders across different issues. As a result, negotiators can have a better cognition of their negotiation tasks and the overall e-Negotiation process can be streamlined. We are extending a negotiation support system to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach, which is the most useful to repeatable and semi-structured negotiations in businessto-business (B2B) e-Commerce and e-Marketplace environments.

Negotiation is a decentralized decision-making process that seeks to find an agreement which will satisfy the requirements of two or more parties in the presence of limited common knowledge and conflicting preferences. Negotiation participants are agents who negotiate on their own behalf or represent the interests of their principals. When electronic negotiations enter the stage, these agents could be intelligent software entities that take part in the process of searching for an acceptable agreement. The degree of involvement of these “intelligent agents ” in negotiations can range from supporting human negotiators (e.g. information search, offer evaluation) to fully automating the conduct of negotiations. Choosing the degree of involvement depends upon the characteristics of the problem in the negotiation. In this chapter, we review electronic negotiation systems and intelligent agents for negotiations. Different types of negotiation agents, their roles and requirements, and various methods for effective support or conduct of negotiations are discussed. Selected applications of intelligent negotiation agents are presented.

In the course of a negotiation it is often the case that the participants exchange packages of offers, which have, at least in the mind of the negotiators, a certain utility for them. We want to test whether the behaviour of the negotiators is reflected in the topology of the concession curve 1 that plots each offer’s utility value in the course of a negotiation. In order to do this, we use data collected with the Inspire electronic negotiation support system, which records utility preference the concession curves using a set of features, such as number of minima and maxima, slope of curve at the beginning and end, and then we use machine learning techniques to test whether we can predict negotiation outcome based on these concessions curve descriptions. We find that there are certain features of this curve, such as the number of minima and maxima, frequency of offers exchanged, that predict with high precision and recall the outcome of negotiations conducted with Inspire. 1

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-toface 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 the 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 ...

Electronic negotiation systems support negotiators in reaching an agreement through collaboration among the involved parties. The development of these systems requires the use of a negotiation methodology and the specification of a negotiation protocol. This contribution presents the foundation of a negotiation methodology and a prototype built upon the methodology which is capable of executing multiple negotiation protocols. The prototype demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed approach, and is currently evaluated in a computer based laboratory experiment.