Group Decision and Negotiation. A Socio-Technical Perspective

In the last decade, social network analytics and related data analysis methodologies have helped big players gain enormous influence on the web, largely due to clever centralistic data collection in major data lakes. In the form of recommender systems, this can also be seen as world-scale group decision support. In our research, we have been more interested in how these kinds of technologies can spill over to smaller-scale communities of interest in the long tail of the internet. Examples include learning communities and open source software development communities of individuals, but also questions of controlled data and knowledge sharing among small and medium enterprises or medical institutions. Especially in the latter cases, we often face strongly conflicting goals that need to be negotiated to mutually acceptable solutions, quite along the original GDSS and NSS visions of Mel Shakun and colleagues. One example is medical research support on rare diseases which raises the need for data sharing across multiple health organizations (not necessarily being fond of each other) in a fully transparent, fraud-resistant research process while preserving best-possible privacy of patient data. We end with a summary of the Industrial Data Space initiative recently proposed by Fraunhofer which aims at architectures, rules and tools for data sovereignty in cross-organizational data management and analytics.

People process and communicate information at multiple levels of abstraction when reading, talking, solving problems, designing and interacting with computers. For example, in reading an article, actors may focus on a letter, a word, a clause, a sentence or a paragraph. At any moment, they focus on a particular level of abstraction, do something, and, under certain conditions, move back and forth to other levels until the actors achieve their goal. Not moving between levels of abstraction when necessary, decreases performance. It follows that human-computer interaction should be designed accordingly, yet there is hardly any explicit mention of abstraction levels in studies or guidelines of designing HCI. In this talk, I propose a method for incorporating abstraction levels in the design of HCI as a critical dimension of designing adaptive HCI. The talk demonstrates the ideas with examples of HCI for supporting online reading and group problem solving.

Our society faces many natural and man-made disasters which can have severe impact in terms of deaths, injuries, monetary losses, psychological distress, and economic effects. Society needs to find ways to prevent or reduce the negative impact of these disasters as much as possible. Information systems have been used to assist emergency response to a certain degree in some cases. However, there continues to be a need to develop more effective collaborative disaster response systems. To identify the core features of such systems, a grounded theory research method is used for data collection and analysis. Data from firsthand interviews and observations was combined with literature and analyzed to discover several emergent issues and concepts regarding collaborative disaster response. The issues and concepts were organized into four categories: (i) context-awareness; (ii) multiparty relationships; (iii) task-based coordination; and (iv) information technology support, which together identified the needs of collaborative disaster response coordination. Using evidence from the data, these factors were related to one another to develop a framework for context-aware multi-party coordination systems. This study contributes to the field of emergency management as the framework represents a comprehensive theory for disaster response coordination that can guide future research on disaster management.

Suzuki and Horita [11] proposed the notion of convergence as a new solution for the procedural choice problem. Given a menu of feasible social choice rules (SCRs) \( F \) and a set of options \( X \), a preference profile \( L^{0} \) is said to (weakly) converge to \( C \,\subseteq\, X \) if every rule to choose the rule (or every rule to choose the rule to choose the rule, and so on) ultimately designates C under a consequential sequence of meta-preference profiles. Although its frequency is shown, for example, under a large society with F = {plurality, Borda, anti-plurality}, a certain failure (trivial deadlock) occurs with small probability. The objective of this article is to find a convergent menu (a menu that can “always” derive the convergence). The results show that (1) several menus of well-known SCRs, such as {Borda, Hare, Black}, are convergent and that (2) the menu {plurality, Borda, anti-plurality} and a certain class of scoring menus can be expanded so that they become convergent.

Due to different attitudes of ex-president and president of Philippines for the South China Sea dispute, the different equilibria of this conflict arose to facilitate the negotiation between China and Philippines. The evolutional conflict models resulted from decision makers’ attitude based on option prioritization under the graph model for conflict resolution are constructed and analyzed in this paper. Compared with the first stage of the South China Sea dispute, the equilibrium of the second stage conflict is different from the first one because current presidential attitude of Philippines is not negative for Chinese government. The two-stage equilibria provide the valuable information that helps decision makers to choose suitable attitude that can be better to understand and resolve the conflict.

Research has dealt many times with behavior as success factor for negotiation outcome. So far, these factors are limited to a specific negotiation situation while no insights into a negotiator’s most recommendable behavior for successive episodes exist. Accordingly, in this work, the effect of pre-negotiation behavior on the main negotiation episode is examined through a buyer-seller negotiation experiment. Records of online chats were investigated by means of content analysis and combined with questionnaire results in order to reveal behavioral patterns in the pre-negotiation and their consequences onto the main negotiation. Two main behavioral streams have been identified: visionary behavior that emphasizes future collaboration in a positive setting and power-related behavior that rather discloses dominating and imposing elements. This study found that visionary behavior in the pre-negotiation episode leads to more success than a power-related behavior in terms of the general agreement on a negotiation’s conduction and the opponent’s concession attitude.

Existing models of negotiation as a process are incomplete and do not show an overall, end to end process. The phases of existing models have not been clearly defined by identifying their boundaries. After reviewing contributions of existing models, the paper identifies phases, clarifies their boundaries, and proposes a bird’s eye level model supported by examples in academic literature and public sources. Although an ideal model, it is a guideline and not a strict prescription for success. The proposed model contributes to theory around negotiation by providing a clarifying look at the overall sequence of macro phases in negotiation. With the model, academics and practitioners have a unified starting point for monitoring, communicating, and further developing negotiation models.

In the preparation phase of negotiation processes, the decision problem needs to be identified to assign preferences and thus enable offer evaluation. However, in software requirements negotiations, identification of the required decision problem structure is not easy, since requirements negotiations vary due to organisational factors such as stakeholders involved or the software development method applied. This paper identifies decision problem structures in software requirements negotiations using a literature-based research approach. In doing so, a matrix of decision relevant information in software requirements negotiations and their representation in a negotiation context is developed. The matrix can be utilised as a framework to select appropriate scenarios of decision problem structures in software requirements negotiations.

Research shows that cultural differences affect negotiation processes and outcomes in many different ways. In this paper, we examine the interactions between communication processes, language, and cultural differences in dyadic e-negotiations. We use textual analysis methods to measure the language sentiment (also referred to as tone) of the messages. We make use of 9,703 messages (and offers with messages) in 1,147 negotiations conducted with the web-based negotiation support system Inspire. We find evidence that the more positive a message’s sentiment, the more positive the sentiment of the next message. Our results indicate that this effect is less pronounced in intercultural negotiations. Furthermore, we observe higher payoffs for the party who initiates the conversation. Initiation reduces the risk of obtaining only a low payoff. Some cultural groups, such as German-speaking Western Europeans, emerge as particularly likely to initiate a negotiation.

Automated negotiation mechanisms (ANMs) can be used to semi-automatically negotiate well-structured but complex contracts. Such negotiations among multiple negotiators, who are represented by software agents, can easily reach a deadlock because they block each others proposals. This of course leads to inferior results. Our aim is to improve the performance of ANMs. In this paper, we try to overcome deadlocks during automated single negotiation text by using compensation payments. Compensation payments are calculated by a mediator according to the Nucleolus method from cooperative game theory. It guarantees that a unique payment is calculated in any case. Furthermore, it lies in the Core, if the Core exists. The proposed ANM can be vulnerable against shading the desired compensation payments. However, our computational experiments suggest that the negotiation results are both superior and faster compared to an ANM without compensation payments. The dominance increases with an increasing number of negotiators.

In group decision-making, the use of Group Decision Support Systems is increasing and in some groups, a facilitator is required to improve communication among participants. The facilitator has several roles in this situation, which include helping decision makers (DMs) to decide which type of aggregation they would prefer in each decision context. Whenever DMs have different objectives regarding the same problem, they might decide a consensual decision is no longer possible. Therefore, other types of aggregation are required. Voting rules are strongly applied in this type of situation. However, the question that arises is: who should decide the voting method? In this article, a framework for choice of a voting procedure in a business decision context is used. It takes the facilitator’s preferences into account while it seeks to choose which voting procedure best suits the environment of the Group Decision Support System GRoUp Support (GRUS).

Shared procedures to build a consensus within a group decision process are sometimes used in multi-criteria decision-making. Facilitators often face several challenges and the solutions to overcome them are scarce and not well documented. This paper presents a case study within a decision framework that combines problem structuring with the multi-criteria decision aid method MACBETH in order to build a shared preference model. The framework was applied in a transportation planning context with a group of professionals from Quebec City, Canada to assess and rank streets as a function of their potential to become Complete Streets. The analysis of the process showed that difficulties in expressing preferences, access to data during workshops, group size, group discussion management, and project length were encountered. Nonetheless, the proposed framework and the use of sub-groups to build criteria scales were a way to overcome these challenges and allowed us to successfully complete the project.

The selection of a technological packages for agriculture is a complex task. Since selecting the best suited for a particular farm, given the rapid development of technology and the many combinations available, is a difficult problem for the decision maker (DM). This paper deals the selection problem of technological packages identifying criteria and alternatives in a group decision making process. The proposed model presents a multicriteria group decision model for ranking technology packages based on the outranking methods. This model is appropriate for those cases where there is great divergence among the DMs. The methodology can be used for defining rural credits (for adapted technological packages) in order to improve farmer’s competitiveness and profitability.

In this paper we study the prenegotiation process of eliciting the negotiators’ preferences and building the negotiation offer scoring system. We analyze how the agents build the formal and quantitative scoring systems based on the preferential information provided by their principals. The results of the bilateral negotiation experiment conducted in Inspire negotiation system are analyzed, in which the simple direct rating technique (SMARTS-like approach) is implemented to evaluate the negotiation problem and build scoring systems. The concordance of such scoring systems with the principal’s preferences was determined using the cardinal and ordinal inaccuracy measures. Then for each agent the scoring system was determined using UTASTAR method based on the same preference structures subjectively declared for direct rating. Finally, the inaccuracy of scoring systems obtained by means of both methods was compared.

In this paper we analyze the problem of recognizing the cognitive heuristics, in particular the errors of perception and information processing, and their impact on the activities of negotiators undertaken in the prenegotiation phase to define, structure and analyze the negotiation problem. We focus on evaluating and analyzing the impact of scaling biases on the accuracy and concordance of negotiation offer scoring systems with the preferential information provided to negotiating agents by their principals. In our study we use the dataset of bilateral electronic negotiations conducted by means of Inspire negotiation support system, which provides users with decision support tools for preference based on direct rating approach. The results of experiments confirm the necessity of building the heuristics-sensitive decision support tools for negotiation support.