InterNeg seminars

The InterNeg seminars take place at the J. Molson School of Business in Montreal.
If you would like to make a presentation or be added to the mailing list, contact Ms. Norma Paradis (nparadis-AT-jmsb.concordia.ca; replacing -AT- with @).

An evaluation of electronic trading systems – auctions versus negotiations
Jesus Rios, Ph. D. student, Rey Juan Carlos University, Madrid, Spain

GM 715
September 20th (Monday), 2004
2:30 - 4:00

We describe an Internet-based architecture for group decision support allowing for more involvement of citizens in public decision making. The architecture needs to support problem structuring, preference and belief modelling, optimization, negotiations in the event of disagreement, and voting in case of nonconvergence of negotiations. After the Porto Alegre experience, participatory budgets are becoming trendy in European municipalities. The idea is to allow citizens to, somehow, participate in the allocation of (part of) their budget. There is little methodology available, and it is mostly based on physical meetings. We describe the associated model and propose two solution methods, based on the modified balanced increment method: one is exact, but may be very time consuming; the other is heuristic which may be much more efficient from a computational point of view. We describe a potential implementation through Internet.

Markets, negotiations and dispute resolution in new economy

InterNeg International Seminar
J. Molson School of Business, Concordia University, Montreal

Concordia University's Samuel Bronfman Building
1590 Doctor Penfield Avenue
October 12-13, 2004

The hallmarks of the new economy are all things electronic — e-commerce, e-business, e-learning, e-government and e-health, not to mention eBay. The common thread of e-anything is that it is a social and/or economic solution implemented in software applications. Being a socio-economic solution it also involves interactions among people which, just as in the past, lead to conflicts and thus negotiation, mediation or arbitration. The negotiation, or more precisely the e-negotiation, is thus the common strand in many of the applications. Governments, businesses and individuals constantly make decisions, and in this process they negotiate roles, prices, dates, delivery terms, and so on. On-line auctions became not only an accepted market mechanism but they also replaced some types of business negotiations. Proliferation of on-line auctions and other business transactions led to construction of dispute resolution systems such as SquareTrade and other types of e-negotiations, for example, ElectronicCourthouse and SmartSettle. The phenomenal growth of telecommunication equally well enables simple exchanges that lead to simple decisions, and very complex exchanges. The purpose of this seminar is to discuss several research projects focussing on the e-negotiation services and business models, design and implementation of e-market systems, construction of conflict resolution mechanisms, and the use of e-negotiation systems. This 2 day international seminar is sponsored by the SSHRC INE project Electronic negotiations, media and transaction for socio-economic interactions. Both days will feature a combination of academics, business people and graduate students who will discuss current topics of e-markets and e-negotiation research.

Towards electronic democracy: Models and methods for participatory budgets
Lutz Limburg, graduate student, Diploma Business Administration and Industrial Engineering University of Karlsruhe

GM 715
October 19th (Tuesday), 2004
2:30 - 4:00

Practical implementations of management information systems today still lack a comprehensive analysis about the usage of appropriate approaches for specific procurement situations. The general position is that auctions are better suited for smaller and less important contracts, and that the flexibility of negotiation support systems provides a more efficient support for defining important contracts with high values at stake. However this position is based on one underlying assumption: Auction-based systems are capable of computing only one attribute in its bidding space – the price. As recent developments conducted a broad range of more sophisticated auction mechanisms which are capable of dealing with multiple issues, there is a strong need for further reviewing this position. Therefore, this work compares an auction-based system and a negotiation support system for a multiple issue scenario. The current aim is to undertake the first step in developing an applied negotiation theory that provides business firms with advice for choosing efficient mechanisms to fulfil certain requirements. Since a more general comparison of auctions and negotiations would be desirable, the empirical part of this work is limited to a procurement situation, for practical reasons. Further exploration of this field is the task of future research.

Previous Seminars