The negotiation protocol is the way and manner the negotiating parties interact
and exchange information. It includes the way in which offers and messages are
constructed and send to the opponent.
At present INSS allows to construct a protocol from three options listed below.
Soon additional options will become available that will greatly enhance the
INSS flexibility and ability to support complex and real-life negotiations.
The list of options considered for the INSS is given below followed by their
more detailed explanations. Note that some of the options can be used in
conjunction with other options.
How to choose?
Because the additional options
listed above are not yet implemented you don't need to choose any
specific protocol now. The three options already implemented provide
you with additional flexibility in conducting negotiations. Be aware that
even if you decide to conduct negotiations using only one option your
partner may not do so. For example, you may want to negotiate in a
parallel manner but your partner may present always incomplete offers
offers. It is then up to you and your partner to decide how the
negotiation is conducted.
Option description
Parallel negotiations allow negotiators to exchange only complete packages.
That is each side has to either present an offer containing all the issues
or not propose an offer at all. Parallel negotiations are often more
difficult than sequential negotiations because negotiators have to think
about all the issues at the same time. Moreover, it is also difficult to
compare offers that may differ not in one value (issue) but in all issues
at the same time. However, the use of preference values and the
contsruction of the utility function allows users to compare offers easily
as each offer is assigned a rating that is based onm the user's
preferences.
The parallel negotiation option is the only one allowed for the INSPIRE
system. INSS allows for both complete and incomplete packages, that is for
sequential and parallel negotiations. Because it would be difficult to
match neoptiongotiators that want to use differente and incompatible
protocols, as it is the case with parallel and sequential negotiations, we
have decided to provide the option which allows for both protocols and left
it to the users to decide on the specific option. Thus it is up to you and
your partner to decide how you want to use the INSS system with respect to
the completeness of the offers.
Sequential negotiations allow for one or more issues negotiated at a time.
In this situation the participants may present an offer that consists of
only one, two, or more issues and their options. That is they need not to
present a complete package covering all the issues to be
negotiated. Sequential negotiations are very often used in real life. This
is not because they are preferred or more efficient than "parallel"
negotiations when complete pacakages are negotiated. On the contrary
sequentai negotiations are often less eficient and more risky than
parallel, but they require less negotiating knowledge and less effort,
appear to be simpler and easier to conduct.
More about sequential negotiations can be found in
Lewicki and Litterer
You may also read an interesting case in
Lewicki and Litterer
of a failed negotiations primarily because
one party was not very experienced and engaged in sequential process.
Many negotiation support systems allow for echange of offers only. In
those systems users submit a package but cannot provide their partners with
arguments, explanations and other statements about their and their partners
offers. The INSS system provides a facility similar to email, where users
may compose messages and send them to their negotiating partners. These
messages may be send together with an offer or athe user may sent a message
instead of an offer.
Messages complementing
offers are sent together with an offer. They often contain a
justification for the offer they accompany and possibly arguments for
rejecting the opponent's previous offer. They may also contain additional
information the that user may want to convey to his or her partner.
Messages replacing offers are
send instead of an offer. At any point in time, the user may want to
discuss other issues other than the offer, ask for clarifications, prompt
the opponent for action, or explain the situation or discuss the protocol
with the partner.
This option will allow to enter any value for a continuous issue other
than the values specified at the beginning of negotiations. The
continuues issue are those for which intermediate values make
sense. Price, for example, is a continuous issue. The initial values may
be $ 10, 420 and $30. This option allows users to enter value of, for
example, $15 which initilaly has not been an option.
Here we will also allow quasi-continuos issues which are naturally
ordered but for which ratios or some other numbers make no sense. For
example, such an issue is the project completion time, or product
delivery time. It does not make sense to talk about delivery time of
1.75 days. However, we will leave this problem to the users and assume
that they will select numbers that make sense in their negotiations.
An important problem that has to be mentioned here is the approximation
of the utility. The utility function that is determined during the
pre-negotiation phase has to be interpolated with new options being
specified.
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Last modified: Wed Nov 21 16:24:09EST 1996
by GEK.
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