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Project 3: Development of ENS’s for Experimental Studies on E-Negotiation and Dispute Resolution

Team

Coordinators:  

G. Kersten, University of Ottawa; Y. Yuan, McMaster University
     
Key researchers:  

M. Benyoucef, University of Ottawa, M. Bichler, Technical University of Munich; T. Bui, University of Hawaii Manoa; J. Etezadi, Concordia University; S. Köszegi, Vienna University; M. Stroebel, BMW; R. Vahidov, Concordia University; R. Vetschera, Vienna University

Summary

This project builds upon the experience gained with Inspire and other ENSs. It aims at the design of:

  1. Simple methods for preference elicitation and measurement.
  2. Holistic evaluation of outcomes.
  3. The construction of a decision and negotiation software environment (Danse).

This project also aims at formulating principles for providing support based on decision- and negotiation-analysis, knowledge-based support and software agents in different configurations. The mechanisms will be used for both user support and software agents’ choice mechanisms. This will allow us to study and simulate various negotiation protocols, media, support tools and knowledge-based software agents, and their implications on the process and outcomes.

This system will be also used to study the issues of adoption of ENS’s which may involve software agents allowing for automation of certain decision-making and negotiation tasks. We need to study what tasks and under what conditions can be automated and how users can effectively communicate with software agents. In addition, we will study validity of the additive decomposed method used in the Inspire. Additive evaluation function can perfectly reflect users preferences only if these preferences satisfy the additive conjoint measurement axioms. We will use the exiting data and also design experiments to study validity of this assumption and will provide recommendation and or alternative approaches for situations where these assumptions are violated.

Key activities:

  1. Development of the negotiation knowledge base.
  2. Bilateral and multi-bilateral negotiations in simple experimental electronic market, pilot study.
  3. Design of e-negotiation protocols for the Invite software.
  4. Procedures and criteria used by human arbitrators for dispute resolution.
  5. Designing an optimal selection algorithm for ENS’s.
  6. Design, development and testing of software agents. Application in dispute resolution.
  7. Study of the linearity assumption of the preferences using the existing Inspire database.
  8. Implementation of Danse in e-negotiation courses, preliminary experiments, pilot study.
  9. Build a fuzzy rule-based arbitration supporting system for dispute resolution. Usability testing and experiments.
  10. Design, development and testing of decision and negotiation software for studying negotiation automation.

 

January 25, 2004