Theory and Applications of e-Negotiations

http://www.kti.ae.poznan.pl/taen04/

Call for Papers

[pdf]

submission deadline: January 15, 2004

The TAEN'04 workshop will be held in conjunction with the *7th International Conference on Business Information Systems BIS 2004*, in Poznan, Poland, April 21-23, 2004. BIS 2003 took place in Colorado Springs; BIS 2004 will be hosted by the Poznan University of Economics. More about BIS can be found at: /

Aims and Scope

The TAEN'04 workshop is an international forum for presentation of, and discussion about, theoretical and practical results in e-negotiations and related areas.

In the context of economy globalization, the use of information and communication technologies in negotiation processes increases. Software agents conduct some negotiations other systems mediate and support them.
As economical actors are increasingly interconnected, and the amount of information exchanged between actors is rapidly increasing, data overflow threatens new economical models emerging from the use of e-negotiations. Tools enabling efficient negotiations in this highly concurrent environment are needed for multinational enterprises spread in many countries, and SMEs and public organizations, which are working in an increasingly international environment.

The workshop aims at bringing together researchers from different disciplines, developers, and users interested in the critical success factors of e-negotiations systems, and looking for new business and research cooperation opportunities. Papers presenting novel results concerning e-negotiations and exploratory presentations that examine open questions and raise fundamental concerns about existing theories are solicited.

Accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings. Selected papers will be considered for publication in Group Decision and Negotiation Journal and Decision Systems Journal.

Important dates

Submission deadline: Jan 15, 2004

Notification: Feb 15, 2004

Final Version: Mar 10, 2004

Conference: Apr 21-23, 2004

Workshop organizers

General Chair

Wojciech Cellary
The Poznan University of Economics, Poland
cellary@kti.ae.poznan.pl
http://www.kti.ae.poznan.pl/

Program Co-Chairs

Gregory Kersten
University of Ottawa and Concordia University, Canada
gregory@jmsb.concordia.ca
http://interneg.org/~gregory/

Willy Picard
The Poznan University of Economics, Poland
picard@kti.ae.poznan.pl
http://www.kti.ae.poznan.pl/

Keynote speakers

Konrad Makomaski, Marketplanet, Poland
Gregory E. Kersten, University of Ottawa and Concordia University, Canada

E-negotiation Users, Configurations, Problems, Processes, and Systems

Abstract:

The participants of e-negotiations share some similarities but are also very different. E-negotiation users come from different cultures and represent different professions. They have different values, traditions, expectations, and cognitive abilities. These and other differences cause that people, as we show, use different approaches in e-negotiations.
Negotiations have different configurations; with the simplest being bilateral. Multi-bilateral negotiations involve a single user who negotiates with many counterparts at the same time. Multilateral negotiation involves many users who seek consensus. In each of these configurations, third parties and other stakeholders may be passive and/or active participants.
Negotiation problems may be simple and highly structured or ill-structured and evolving during the negotiators’ interactions. In some negotiation problems issues that can be discussed in isolation. In other problems the issues are in complex relationships and specification of their values requires solving large-scale models.
Negotiation processes involve the use of different approaches, tactics and strategies. Their selection depends on the negotiator’s characteristics, the problem and the context. The selection also depends on the approaches, tactics and strategies used by the negotiator’s counterparts. Empirical and theoretical negotiation research has proposed a large number of rules, models and procedures that can be used in negotiations.
E-negotiation systems (ENSs) have been designed in order to mediate, support and aid users in their efforts to arrive at an agreement. With a few exceptions, these systems are built for homogeneous users who negotiate over simple and well structured problems. No current ENS is capable of providing meaningful support to heterogeneous users involved in different configurations of negotiations, negotiating over ill-structured and evolving problems, and using different approaches, tactics and strategies. We address two issues that underlie the design of a software platform to aid and support e-negotiations intended for those users.
The first issue is protocol design. Protocol design has been proposed for negotiations among software agents in order to allow these agents to communicate and interpret messages. This contribution of the field of artificial intelligence is of great importance for the design of ENSs. The proposed perspective here is that a protocol determines the instantiation of an ENS for a particular negotiation configuration, the users’ permissible interactions, the negotiation support and other tools which can be used in the process. Example of protocols and their formalization are presented. Some desired properties of protocols and their preconditions are also discussed.
The second issue pertains to the the architecture of a software platform, Invite, providing a run-time environment for different ENSs. The platform implements a “negotiation controller” capable of executing different negotiation protocols concurrently, while enabling users to map negotiation activities to system components and to construct their own negotiation protocols.
The purpose of Invite is to generate ENSs instances for experimental research, field studies and real-life negotiations. The construction of a specific instance is done by a protocol designer, who assembles a negotiation protocol, chooses the rules of users’ interaction and selects the interface. The run-time environment and the negotiation controller are independent of a specific negotiation domain and of negotiation protocols in the sense that the implemented class of negotiation protocols is not fixed, but extendable by the protocol designer through the introduction of new system components and rules. We present the architecture of Invite as an example of a software platform for flexible and customizable ENSs.

Program Committee Members

Jean-Marc Andreoli, Xerox Research Centre Europe, France
Stefania Castellani, Xerox Research Centre Europe, France
Francisco Javier Estaire, Technical University of Madrid, Spain
Lutfar Khan, Victoria University, Australia
Mark Klein, MIT Sloan School of Management, USA
Hsiangchu Lai, National Sun Yat-sen University, Taiwan
Winfried Lamersdorf, University of Hamburg, Germany
Han La Poutré, National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science, Netherlands
Benchaphon Limthanmaphon, King Mongkut's Institute of Technology, Thailand
Wee Keong Ng, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
Mareike Schoop, RWTH, Germany
Michael Stroebel, BMW Group, Germany
Christof Weinhardt, University of Karlsruhe, Germany

Paper Submission

Papers must be submitted electronically to taen04@kti.ae.poznan.pl in either Microsoft Word or RTF file format. 50-70-word abstract should be included at the beginning of the paper which size should be up to 5000 words.

Conference Venue

Poznan is in the mid way between Warsaw and Berlin. It is the historic capital of Great Poland, the cradle of the Polish nation. With more than 120.000 students, Poznan is one of the largest academic centers in Poland.

Poznan has many interesting historical buildings. Its main architectural relic is the late 13th-century town hall, later enlarged in the Renaissance style. The town hall is surrounded by old merchant houses that altogether form a picturesque Old Market. The monumental gothic cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul towers above the Ostrow Tumski Island. In its golden Byzantine style chapel the remains of the first Polish kings Mieszko I and Boleslaw the Brave have been laid to rest.

Traveling to Poznan

Poznan can be reached in several easy ways. Direct flights are from Frankfurt, Vienna and Copenhagen. Alternatively, from Warsaw one can either fly to Poznan with a domestic airline or take a 2 hour 40 minute train ride. From Berlin, it is also approximately a 3-hour train ride to Poznan.

Visa is not required for citizens from USA and most European countries. For other countries, please contact the nearest Polish consulate.

PDF version at: http://www.kti.ae.poznan.pl/taen04/TAEN_CfP.pdf