Building a Multiple-Criteria Negotiation Support System

• Authors: Timon C. Du;Hsing-Ling Chen
• Venue: IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering
• Year: 2007

Electronic negotiation systems have been devised to create an electronic marketplace for bargaining, auctions, reverse auctions, and exchanges between multiple buyers and sellers. Most studies of negotiation systems concentrate on negotiation process modeling and data modeling—rather than on strategies and efficiency—for a multiple-criteria decision making (MCDM) problem in which many criteria are taken into account as attributes for decision making. This study proposes an active collaboration and negotiation framework (ACNF), which is a negotiation support system that uses active documents with embedded business logics or business rules that can adapt to different collaborative strategies in a business-to-business (B2B) environment. The risk preferences of negotiators are modeled and measured by utility functions that provide mathematical tools to compute the relative value of different courses of action. The system is demonstrated, and three experiments are conducted to validate its performance. The experiments show that the negotiation process is very efficient, and the results are both close to the efficient point—or the Pareto frontier—and are fair to both negotiating parties. The framework can be used to efficiently and effectively achieve a settlement in various multiple-criteria bargaining schemes in the electronic marketplace.