A Research In The Theories And Designs Of Negotiation Support Systems

Negotiation has become a widespread and important social phenomenon. Accordingly, research on negotiation support systems (NSSs) has grown rapidly and served as a major concern since the late 1980s. In this dissertation, some elementary notions and theories of NSSs are reviewed. The negotiation models on which NSSs are based are introduced and a general process of human negotiation is analyzed. Based on the above mentioned contents, the major research works are listed as follows:The conduct of negotiation analysis involves support for offer and counter-offer evaluation by means of ratings based on the utility functions which directly influences the final solution of the negotiation. In most cases, the number of package is very large and negotiators need some way of selectively presenting just a few packages for them to rate, yet obtain reliable utility values. This dissertation introduces conjoint analysis combined with orthogonal design to construct a utility function. Using conjoint analysis, the total utility of a package is decomposed into constituent option utilities. The orthogonal design is one of the most compact and effective designs that minimize the number of packages to be evaluated by users, while still giving a good picture of the users' preferences. With the utility functions constructed, negotiators could get further analysis using the model of bargaining problem, such as Nash's bargaining theorem, Zeuthen principles, etc. Then, the model base of NSSs can be constructed on the basis of the formed model system.This dissertation discusses some main issues of negotiation structuring that should be taken into account when designing NSS, including behavioral characteristics and cognitive perspectives of negotiators, communication needs of different bargaining settings. The function and working mechanism of NSSs are analyzed. The three-level architectures, i.e., user oriented, designer-oriented and tool-smith-oriented, are proposed to guide the design of NSSs. In addition, a computer-aided model of analysis of mediating in the setting of multi-lateral negotiation is designed.Because negotiation and conflict resolution are complex and unstructured or semi-structured tasks, they need sophisticated decision support. Due to the uncertain and changing nature of the processes, it is important for negotiators to have access to previous cases and to have an agent acting as the mediator when impasses occur. In this dissertation, a negotiation process model which employs case-based reasoning (CBR) to provide intelligent support for negotiators is constructed. The CBR system retrieves appropriate precedent cases from memory and selects the most similar ones from those retrieved. Then the system constructs a solution for evaluation and modification so as to generate proposals that should move negotiators towards a settlement.The emergence and quickly spreading use of the World Wide Web (WWW) and electronic commerce indicate the potential of NSSs supporting commercial transactions across borders. It is necessary to conduct and study Web-based negotiation support systems (WNSSs). In this dissertation, three main WNSSs are introduced. The architecture and characteristics of WNSSs are analyzed under the net-centric computing paradigm. In addition, to show how WNSSs work, a simple negotiation has been set up using the first system designed to conduct negotiations on the Web, i.e., INSPIRE.The NSS of Hengte company is constructed based on the theory of conjoint analysis and case-based reasoning to provide intelligent support for negotiators. Using a real example of negotiation, the working process of the system is illustrated in detail and the good performance of the system is verified.In the end, this dissertation concludes the whole work with suggestions for the future research needed to improve NSSs.