Negotiation is one of the key elements in the business activity. Traditional approach to negotiation takes place in a face-to-face environment. E-negotiations present all or part of the negotiating processes through the electronic media or digital channels, to transfer data or to help to achieve better negotiation effects. With the rapid development in E-Commerce, the Internet has becoming an important and inevitable channel of trade and business communication, as well as E-negotiations. Therefore, E-negotiation is progressively popularized and valued. In addition to assisting in communication and decision, the other significant contribution to adopt e-negotiation is to collect the complete and detailed data in every negotiation process, as well as the result. We are able to have clearer understanding in negotiation behavior through analyzing the negotiation behavior data, and therefore will be able to proceed to construct the theory of negotiation. The purpose of negotiations is to successfully agree on, explore which negotiation strategies minister to agreements, and to obtain more knowledge in achieving successful negotiations. Likewise, this is the purpose of this research. Inspire is the first web-based e-negotiation system, and built in 1996. The data collected by this system include users¡¦ demographic data, system usage, offers and counter offers, final agreements, strategy adopted, utility values, and so on. This research has collected 700 pairs of one-to-one negotiation activity records from Inspire negotiation support system, and has grouped negotiators into two groups, cooperative and non-cooperative, using the clustering analysis technology. These two groups manifest differences in the aspects of negotiation outcome and negotiation strategy.

It is getting more important to have quick response during the negotiation process due to the very competitive environment. However, in the negotiation process, it is quite often that negotiators do not have enough time to understand the negotiation issue, the available alternatives and their priorities. In addition, negotiators may also have difficulties to catch path of interactions between negotiators, i.e. negotiation dance. These problems may have negative impact on the negotiation results or even break the negotiation. The goal of this research is to help negotiators with clearer picture about the negotiation issues and the interactions between negotiators in order to have better negotiation decisions during the negotiation process. First, the challenges in understanding the negotiation issues and the interactions between negotiators are identified. Then, based on the identified challenges, five negotiation decision support agents are designed. The algorithm of each agent is proposed too. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed agents, prototypes of two agents have been developed and evaluated through an experiment. The result is positive.

Because of global economic influence and the prevalence of internet technology, the new e-commerce market gradually takes form. The more e-commerce grows the more e-negotiation activities increase. In the meanwhile, growing access to the worldwide has increased the amount of international, cross-cultural e-commerce negotiations conducted online. Due to increasing probability of inter-cultural factors in e-negotiation, understanding strategies over e-negotiations and discovering the impact of culture on strategies of e-negotiations become increasingly important. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of different cultures on strategies of dyadic e-negotiations and to investigate the difference of strategy both in intra- and inter-cultural e-negotiation. Going to more detailed, this study further examines how Eastern and Western negotiators differ from each other in terms of their strategic adjustments. In order to have more comprehensive understanding of the impact of culture on the actual negotiation strategic behaviors in negotiation processes, we apply content analysis, which is more thorough than the questionnaire in terms of qualitative criteria. According to the result of this study, there are four major propositions: firstly, there are differences between intra- and inter-culture e-negotiation; secondly, the negotiation behavior of Easterners in inter-cultural negotiations will be different from that in intra-cultural negotiations; thirdly, the negotiation behavior of Westerners in inter-cultural negotiations will be different from that in intra-cultural negotiations; and finally, inter-cultural negotiation consistently has more ¡§distributive information¡¨ behavior in e-negotiations. These propositions can be analyzed from further viewpoints or conscientious experimentations in the future.

Research into negotiation systems has primarily focused on those for e-commerce and electronic markets, where quantitative values such as prices are key to what is being negotiated. However, there is a lack of research into tool support for complex real-life negotiations of documents that contain large amounts of textual (qualitative) clauses. Examples of such text-based agreements include international trade and climate-change treaties, as well as labor-management collective agreements. Our goal is to improve the state of the art in textual negotiation technology, so it can be applied to such agreements and their negotiations. In particular, we want to be able to develop technology that can facilitate the delicate give-and-take involving proposed changes, positions, rationale exchange, partial resolutions to disagreements, tracking of notes taken by the negotiators, as well as the ability to search and compare all of the above to facilitate negotiations. We posit that there would be significant societal benefit from the hyper-local to the international level if better technology was available. We performed literature reviews of existing negotiation systems and systems for representing legal documents to study what has been done in this domain. We also performed a grounded theory study based on interviews with people that have participated in real-life negotiations. An end-user's survey of negotiation systems was also conducted and analyzed. We used the results from the literature review, grounded theory and survey analysis, as the basis for a subsequent phase of design-science research in which we developed use cases, requirements and a comprehensive metamodel for qualitative negotiation tools, as well as a prototype negotiation tool.

Submitted by Caroline Falcao (caroline.rfalcao@ufpe.br) on 2017-06-01T18:14:47Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Fernando TESE.pdf: 6232408 bytes, checksum: 2758b5fef89a3422ca1f59c9255a8e14 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-01T18:14:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Fernando TESE.pdf: 6232408 bytes, checksum: 2758b5fef89a3422ca1f59c9255a8e14 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-05-21 / A complexidade de um processo licitatório, o princípio da isonomia e a tentativa de obter a proposta mais vantajosa têm induzido a administração pública a adotar uma abordagem de seleção de fornecedores, onde o preço é o único aspecto considerado. Com o objetivo de apoiar este processo, esta tese propõe um modelo de seleção de fornecedores, baseado na legislação brasileira de licitação, que contempla uma etapa de negociação sobre múltiplos aspectos. O modelo estrutura o processo de compras de bens na administração pública em um fluxo de atividades: (i) captação das propostas; (ii) etapa de negociação; e (iii) homologação e adjudicação das propostas. A etapa de negociação consiste de um modelo de apoio à negociação multibilateral e multiaspecto, cuja estratégia adotada garanta ganhos mútuos máximos para as partes envolvidas. O modelo proposto é ilustrado por meio de um processo licitatório já finalizado. Através desta ilustração é possível verificar que o modelo agrega maior dinâmica a lei de licitações, pois as ofertas dos fornecedores são intervalos de valores em diferentes aspectos ao invés de uma oferta fixa e única apenas no aspecto preço. Verificou-se também que a proposta pode ser utilizada para apoiar processos de seleção de fornecedores de empresas do setor privado. / The complexity of bidding process, the equality principle and the attempt to obtain the most advantageous bid have led the government to adopt a selection supplier approach, in which the price is the only issue considered. In order to support this process, this thesis proposes a supplier selection model based on the Brazilian bidding law, which includes a negotiation stage on multiple issues. The model organizes the public bidding process in a flow of activities: (i) bids reception; (ii) negotiation stage; and (iii) approval and award of bids. The negotiation stage is developed as a model to support multi-bilateral and multi-issue negotiations, whose adopted strategy ensures joint maximum gains for the parties involved. The proposed model is illustrated through its application for a bidding process already concluded. This illustration showed that the model aggregates more dynamic to the bidding law since the suppliers bids are ranges of values in different issues instead of a single bid in the price issue only. It was verified that the proposal can be used to support suppliers selection processes in private sector companies.