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

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.

A flexible and highly customizable software platform to conduct research on e-negotiation is presented. The software platform enables negotiators to map negotiation activities to system components and construct their own protocols by creating a sequence of layout programs invoking components and rules. The system design is discussed and selected implementation details are presented to give an overview of the approach taken.

Abstract. An e-market system is a concrete implementation of a market institution; it embeds one or more exchange mechanisms. E-market systems are also information systems which are information and communication technologies artifacts. This work puts forward an argument that the study of e-markets must incorporate both the behavioral economics as well as the information systems perspectives. To this end the paper proposes a conceptual framework that integrates the two. This framework is used to formulate a model, which incorporates the essential features of exchange mechanisms, as well as their implementations as is artefacts. The focus of attention is on two classes of mechanisms, namely auctions and negotiations. They both may serve the same purpose and their various types have been embedded in many e-market systems.