Tutorials   INSPIRE materials   Courseware   Presentations

Individual project: Part B

This part of your individual project aims at exploring the possibilities opened up by the Internet for business decision making. In order to facilitate your learning process, you will be asked to participate in virtual negotiations. The system you are going to use applies several OR methodologies to support individual negotiators to reach a compromise. Most of these methodologies deal with the procedures of preference assessment and compromise reaching. You will be exposed to them by negotiating with an unknown opponent over a predetermined case. Please read the instructions below carefully, and contact me if you have any questions.

Tool
You are asked to use the INSPIRE system. It is a Web-based system for studying and training negotiation and negotiation support. The system has been developed by Professor Gregory Kersten and his team at Carleton University and it is the first of its kind.
    You may learn more about INSPIRE by going to its site and navigating through its introductory pages. There you will find an example and general information on how the system can be used. Here is the link to the home page of the system: INSPIRE
     Read the INSPIRE handouts before using it. There you will learn about how to get started and all the main steps and actions that need to be taken.Process
Please familiarize yourself with the basics of the INSPIRE system as soon as possible. You can do that by visiting the INSPIRE home page and reading the handouts. In a due course, an individual negotiation name will be supplied to each of you by the system administrator (please write it down to remember it).
     During a week of January 6, each of you will be asked to select an alias under which you want to negotiate (remember it as it is your "key" to a negotiation session). Before January 22 you will receive an email from the INSPIRE administrator that your negotiation has been set up and you have been assigned an opponent. Your negotiation period is from January 22 to February 10 (which is a negotiation deadline). Begin your negotiation.

That is go to the INSPIRE home page (INSPIRE) and submit the following:

• Negotiation name: whatever name was given to you by system administrator (Remember that only you know this name and that you are not able to access your negotiation without providing this name to a system.)
• User name (your alias) that you selected.
• Do not submit your password, it is not required.

Please remember that the negotiation has deadline after which you cannot continue. That is either you achieve a compromise before the deadline or the negotiation are concluded without an agreement. Please remember to fill out both questionnaires which INSPIRE presents to you.

What to Submit
You are asked to write a report discussing the following issues:

• description of your preferences prior to starting the negotiations (1/2 page);
• description of a preference assessment component of the INSPIRE system and its role in learning/clarifying/confusing your own preferences (1 page);
• description of a negotiation case and a negotiation process, including starting position, intermediate positions, compromise reached (1 - 2 pages);
• own conclusions (1/2 page).

The reports will be subject of in-class discussion.

General Comments
This part of your assignment should not take more than four hours. About one hours is to familiarize with the system and prepare for negotiation. The negotiation is prolonged but it should not take more then 10 or 15 min. at a time.

Note
The INSPIRE system is widely used by the instructors and business professionals in Canada, US, Europe and Asia. Therefore information about average number of sessions it takes to reach a compromise is available to the instructor. After a negotiation deadline, the system administrator will provide me with the statistics regarding your log-ins to the system (content of email messages you sent is confidential and is not revealed to me). On the basis of this information, I will be able to analyze the process of reaching a compromise by each of you. Those of you who followed a process significantly different from a norm, will be asked to write additional two pages explaining peculiarities of your negotiation sessions. These two pages, together with the original report submitted on February 17 will be subject of my evaluation.