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e-Negotiations of Contracts This tutorial is focusing on technical approaches to e-negotiations of contracts. The aim of this tutorial is to introduce participants to the technologies associated with e-negotiations of contracts as well as provide a brief overview of key research issues in this new and fast growing area.
In the era of delocalization and globalization of economy, companies need to negotiate at a global scale. The high costs related to face-to-face meetings can be reduced by the use of the Internet as a communication medium. New tools are, however, needed to allow contractors, both from multinational enterprises and from SMEs, to negotiate efficiently in this highly concurrent environment that Internet is.
The detailed plan of the tutorial is the following.
1. Basic concepts Multiple research areas related to negotiations - e.g. economics, sociology, history, or psychology - are briefly presented to give a complete overview of existing approaches to negotiations. Concepts concerning both contracts and e-negotiations are then defined, e.g. integrative/distributive negotiations, single/multi-attribute contracts, Pareto-optimal results or the Nash equilibrium.
2. Contract e-Negotiation Taxonomy A taxonomy of e-negotiation approaches is presented that allows to classify existing approaches to e-negotiations of contracts. Two criteria are used to define this taxonomy. The first one is the number of negotiators involved in the negotiation, while the second one is complexity of negotiated contracts, in terms of number of attributes, qualitative or quantitative character of the attributes, and existence or not of formal specification of semantics.
3. Mass e-Negotiations of Simple Contracts Mass e-negotiations of simple contracts are negotiations in which the number of negotiators is high and a few attributes of contracts - usually only the price - are negotiated. Agent-based negotiation models are particularly well adapted to this kind of negotiations. In these models, first, negotiators usually inform their agents about their preferences concerning the output of the negotiation, second, agents cooperate to find an optimal result for all negotiators. Agent-based negotiation models are presented, as well as their limitations.
4. Negotiation of Complex Contracts by Few Negotiators In the case of complex contracts - such as loan contracts - containing many attributes, both quantitative and qualitative, potentially without any formally specified semantics, agent-based negotiation models are not well adapted. The complexity of contracts imposes the intervention of humans as the "thinking unit" of the negotiation process. Negotiation Support Systems (NSS) have been built to provide negotiators with communicating and decision-making tools. Both aspects of negotiation support systems - communication and decision-making - are presented and discussed.
5. Mass e-Negotiation of Complex Contracts When a high number of negotiators are working on complex contracts, agent-based models are not a solution, because of the lack of semantics attached to negotiated contracts. Negotiation support systems are a viable solution under condition that they provide negotiators with some synthetic views of the negotiations process. The multi-facet analysis approach that allows negotiators to analyze various aspects of a given negotiation process is presented and discussed in details.
6. Conclusions and Discussion This tutorial is addressed both to the attendees having technical and economical background in negotiations, as this tutorial shows the relationships between economical environments and possible technical solutions for e-negotiations. The target audience includes:
Willy Picard
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