Glossary
- Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement
(BATNA)
- BATNA is the minimum acceptable value for a negotiated agreement. This value is
determined by individual party's knowledge of the negotiated issues
and options. Any offer which is higher than
BATNA is better than an impasse. During the negotiation process, the compromise
comes from the offer which is more attractive than both parties' BATNA.
- Compromise
- A compromise or agreement is the package (combination of options across all issues) that both
negotiators jointly agree upon after exchanging a sequence of offers.
- Configuring a negotiation
- To set up each new negotiation, INSPIRE has to be
provided with a minimum of three pieces of information: the unique name of the negotiation, and two user
names. Currently the list of issues being negotiated must also be provided to the
INSPIRE administrators before the negotiation begins. Thus a "configuration" is
defined as the combination of participants and issues that constitute a particular
negotiation.
- Improving the joint outcome
- The joint outcome is the compromise that both parties
settle upon after a series of offer exchanges. INSPIRE has a post-settlement stage, during
which it uses the preference information provided by each user to determine whether it is
possible to construct a new offer that is better than the joint outcome for at least
one party, and equally good or better than the joint outcome for the other party;
this analysis is known as "improving the joint outcome."
- Interpreting offer ratings
- The rating displayed on an offer is computed from the preference ratings you provide in
the first part of your negotiation. Remember that your counterpart's rating of a package
is unlikely to be the same as yours. Your counterpart never sees the ratings that you see
on a package, since what he/she sees is based on his/her initial preference ratings.
This means that the numerical difference between the ratings of two offers will not be the
same as the difference in the ratings seen by your counterpart. For example, a revised
offer which lowers the rating of your package by 10 points from your previous offer may
only raise your counterpart's rating of that package by 3 points or may even lower your
counterpart's rating.
- Issue
- A topic of discussion that is of particular interest in a negotiation. Each issue has a
range of alternatives or options, one of which must ultimately
be agreed upon by the negotiators in order to achieve a compromise.
- Logrolling
- A kind of trade-off between two or more decision
makers: giving favours or making concessions on condition of receiving other favours.
- NegoDance Graph
- The exchange of offers and counter-offers can be seen only from one negotiator's
perspective (as in the History of Offers graph) or, if both negotiators agree, from the
perspective of both of them. One dimension presents ratings of one negotiator and the
second dimension those of the second negotiator. With each offer, ratings of both
negotiators are associated. Thus you may review the changes in the ratings (concessions)
accepted by each negotiator.
- Negotiation
- While the common meaning of the term "negotiation" is well known, a Web based
system such as INSPIRE needs to give it a specific technical meaning because there are
multiple users conducting multiple negotiations on possibly the same or different sets of
issues on the system, via a common set of Web pages which may be visited in a different
order each time. To keep things organized, each "negotiation" is uniquely
identified by a negotiation name, and defined as the
complete sequence of interactions between INSPIRE and a particular pair of users
(beginning with preference elicitation, continuing through offer exchange, reaching
agreement, and ending with post-settlement analysis), on a particular set of issues. Thus,
the same pair of users may conduct more than one negotiation on the same set of issues,
but for each instance the negotiation name will be
different.
- Negotiation name
- In combination with the user name, a negotiation name
uniquely identifies an INSPIRE negotiation. A user can conduct
multiple negotiations simultaneously on the system using different negotiation names.
Unlike your user name, your negotiation name is not displayed by the system to
your counterpart.
- Offer
- A combination of options (a package) that is sent by one
negotiator to the other. In INSPIRE, an offer consists of a package plus an optional
message.
- Option
- One of the alternative values that an issue can take. For
example, the issue "Tolerable product failure rate" may have the options
"3%", "5%" and "10%".
- Package
- A particular combination of options that has been selected
across all the issues. For example,
| Price |
3000 $ |
| Payment |
Upon delivery |
| Failure rate |
5% |
is a package.
- Prenegotiation
- Prenegotiation is the first phase of a negotiation. It refers to the initial period
(prior to exchange of any offers) when one prepares for the negotiation. Some activities
involved in this phase include problem definition, preference elicitation, and evaluation
of alternative packages.
- Post-settlement
- A "settlement" is the same as an agreement or compromise,
and "post-settlement" refers to the period after the first compromise has been
achieved. (If your first compromise was not as good as INSPIRE thinks it possible for both
sides to achieve, INSPIRE suggests that you continue into the post-settlement stage and
try to improve your joint outcome.)
- Rating
- Rating is the core activity of prenegotiation
preparation. The purpose of rating is to use numerical expression to clarify negotiator's
preference and utility level of individual negotiation issue, option and package. In INSPIRE, the user is
required to specify these three ratings according to personal preference and knowledge.
The utility function of individual negotiator is generated not only
from the composition of the issue and option ratings but also from the decomposition of
package evaluation. According to the utility function, any adjustment of the package
evaluation may lead to variation of utility level of other packages.
- Trade-off
- A trade-off is an exchange process in which a decision maker gives up partly on some
issues so as to gain on other issues.
- User name
- This is a name used by INSPIRE during login and throughout the negotiation. Since it is
the only name displayed by the system to your counterpart, you can preserve your anonymity
by choosing an arbitrary user name.
In combination with the negotiation name, a user name
uniquely identifies one of the two participants in a given INSPIRE negotiation.
A user name is specific to a given negotiation, and can be reused in another negotiation.
Thus a user name does not uniquely identify a real user (and is therefore not like a Unix
login-id).
- Utility function
- A utility function is a subjective measurement that expresses the relative value of
different package by using a numerical scale. The numerical
scale used is arbitrary. It typically ranges either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 100. The
minimum number expresses the least desirable and least preferred package. The highest
number represents the most desirable and preferred package.
© Copyright1996-2000 The InterNeg Group.
