Towards interdisciplinary perspective of electronic negotiation support systems

by Park, Sungsoon.

iii The principle objective of this research is to develop a prototype for negotiation support systems which aid human negotiators with strategies in electronic negotiation environments. Negotiation is a multi-party decision making process and is conceptualized as decision making activities. The negotiation process is also complex in that an overall understanding of all goals, solutions, and their interactions can be extremely entangled. Negotiation complexity affects the various interests in many research fields such as social science, economics, computer sciences and information systems. The field of Negotiation Support Systems (NSS) is also developing a number of innovative research areas and covers a wide range of individual and group decision support technologies. However, many negotiation support systems have not been used in practice negotiation situations because much NSS research has focused on the design and implementation of NSS that often apply little behavioral and economic knowledge. In the past, behavioral issues were largely ignored in NSSs and DSSs, which are based on formal approaches because these systems were designed for the analysts and experts rather than negotiators themselves. Thus, e-negotiation media and support systems necessitate integration of the results of behavioral studies in models proposed in decision theory, game theory, and negotiation analysis. To achieve an interdisciplinary approach, behavioral issues are critical for the adoption of the emerging field of e-negotiations and NSS. Research into experimental games provides theoretical and empirical tools for iv investigating interactive decision making. These tools provide methods for theory validation as well as information on empirical behavioral regularities that are of potential value to real world decision making. For the research objective, an empirical negotiation game context is introduced as a two-party, distributive (single issue) and incomplete information context with an electronic text-base (i.e., chatting tool) not face-to-face negotiation. Through a descriptive symmetrical test within the provided negotiation context and previous behavioral research review, the negotiation support contents (NSCs) model which has two phases of negotiation process: Preparation and Initial offer phases, is defined. To evaluate the NSCs model, two types of experiments are designed and conducted. One is symmetric descriptive (Type 1) and the other is asymmetric prescriptive/descriptive (Type 2). In the Type 1 experiment, both parties join the experiment without the NSCs. However, only role sellers in the Type 2 experiment join experiment with NSCs, not the role buyer. The compared results of the Type 1 and the Type 2 experiments show that the role sellers’ initial counteroffers in Type 2 are significantly higher than those of the Type 1 sellers. This initial offer behavior of Type 2 sellers affects the final prices which are higher than the Type 1 final prices. Based on empirical results, the NSCs model applies to the design of NSS and is an aiding tool for novice negotiators. This study also suggests that a behavioral studies perspective could apply to the design of NSS research and the study suggests a methodology to satisfy the desire for an interdisciplinary perspective in NSS study.