Emotions play an important role in affecting human¡¦s behaviors. It is obvious especially in the negotiation process. However, these emotional interactions disappear in the electronic communication media. Emoticons provide a new way for negotiators to show their emotions in e-negotiation. E-negotiation support system is composed of electronic communication and decision support system. Using emoticons could help negotiators display their emotions to counterparts. This study explored the effect of emoticon on negotiation process from the aspect of communication. In general, e-communication can be separated into social-emotional communication and task-oriented communication. Emoticons retrieve multiple cues and enable negotiators transmit emotions so that the interactions increase. As a result, more social-emotional communication happens between negotiators. Previous studies indicate that nonverbal cues could add the meaning of messages. In the negotiation process, negotiators may lower down the opportunity of misunderstanding by using emoticons to express their thought in text and increase the quality of communication. The negotiation process may be more effective and increase the ability to reach agreement. Negotiators will be more satisfied of the process and their counterparts when the outcome is equal or better than what they expected. The purpose of this study is to explore whether supporting emoticons influence negotiators communication behavior and change the negotiation process. For this purpose, we conducted an experiment and adopted content analysis to define the social-emotional communication and task-oriented communication behaviors. We also measured the perceived communication effectiveness and satisfaction of negotiation process by questionnaire. The results showed that emoticons increase the frequency of social-emotional communication. Social-emotional communication also increases the negotiators¡¦ task-oriented communication. As a result the communication becomes more effective. Negotiators have better satisfaction of negotiation process.

Following the booming of global e-business, the demand for online negotiations is growing apparently. Recently, instant messaging (IM) software such as Microsoft MSN, Yahoo messenger has become very popular synchronous communication tool. Although the instant messaging tools make people can negotiate or communicate with each other synchronously over the Internet, in terms of the richness of communication media, instant messaging is leaner than that of traditional face-to-face. Previous studies have demonstrated that the media richness of communication has effect on negotiation behavior and result. To improve the richness of the instant messaging, many instant messaging tools have provided a variety of emoticons for user. Due to the popularity of instant messaging and emoticon usage, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of emoticons on synchronous e-negotiation environment. In this study, we conducted a lab experiment to simulate synchronous negotiations. The findings reveal that emoticons have effects on negotiation process and negotiators¡¦ communication ability.