Instructors questions

We seek questions from instructors who have used the Inspire system in their courses. They are very much appreciated and on this page we try to address your concerns.

"I have organised the course in such a way that those 30-60 students would usually begin their  INSPIRE-negotiations in the last quarter of the course, i.e., December/January and June/July. I was wondering what you would suggest I should do in this case. Will it be necessary to set up experiments  the way you describe it in your instructor's notes or would you also be able to handle such a number of students even if they contacted you individually? Which way would increase their chances of not negotiating within their own group?" (Rainer Thormann, Chemnitz Technical University)

Setting up negotiations and managing them is easier and more effective when groups sign up through the instructor's page. We receive many individual requests from web surfers but often these people are not serious which leads to complaints from their negotiation partners. We never refuse a request, however, this may be at a cost to the negotiating partner who uses INSPIRE for an assignment. If students contact us individually then we pair them on the "first come first serve" basis to minimize the waiting period.
      The easiest way to request negotiations for a group is through the Instructor Synopsis page, however, we suggest that instructors read the Instructors Notes page where more information is given. Then a web page is automatically generated and it contains a form for students to register individually at their leisure. We appreciate getting notice well in advance so that we can try to organize other groups of students. This is because we do our best not to mach students from the same university or even the same country. (Gregory Kersten, InterNeg).

"I would like to ask you concerns the anonymity in these negotiations. Since most of my students did not like negotiating with someone hiding behind an alias, I would be interested to know whether there are any other reasons than those I have tried to find out from all the material published at your web site. As I have already said, a very valuable and motivating aspect of the Inspire programme is the cross-cultural contact. Therefore, it would be sad if my students didn't even know who their counterparts were. If  I understood it correctly from your material, the basic reason for anonymity is that it might favour those at a disadvantage (e.g. smaller companies) and/or the underprivileged (e.g. 'third world' countries). But how realistic is such an approach?"(Rainer Thormann, Chemnitz Technical University)

Why anonymity in INSPIRE negotiations? Here are several reasons why we support anonymous negotiations:

• Many users have email addresses that are not indicative to a country or a region (i.e., @hotmail.com). They can come from any corner of the world and it is not possible to discover their nationality or culture from the email address.
• An important aspect of negotiations in the real world is not to have biases and pre- conceptions.
• In many countries the person's name is not an indication of her/his nationality; we may have a third generation American Japanese, or a German who is taking ESP in Canada and who anglicised her first name and uses Inspire.
• Learning the partner's identity may be misleading as s/he may be located in one part of the world but represent a company located elsewhere.
• Our assumption is that the users are often inexperienced negotiators, their command of English language may differ, as well as their cultural and educational backgrounds differ. Anonymity, in this case hide disadvantages and balancing of these and other inequalities. We think that it gives users more confidence in their interactions. In fact we have received several comments supporting this claim and they reflected both language as well as cultural and gender differences.
• Anonymity is not enforced; on several occasions the partners provided their true names and exchanged email addresses. They discussed personal issues in additon the issues relevant to the Itex-Cypress business negotiations.

Inspire is a fairly simple system that can be used by almost anyone anywhere. It is oriented toward training and not currently configured as a system to support real-life negotiations. It does not facilitate simultaneous negotiations with multiple partners (what is necessary in purchasing negotiations), it does not have hooks to local systems allowing, for example, for the financial analysis of offers, and so on. Our aim was to provide users with a simple negotiation methodology (preparation, conduct and post-settlement) and tools to help them to manage the process. (Gregory Kersten, InterNeg)

Does it imply that for people in the real virtual market place it is also left to their discretion whether or not they want to identify themselves or is the rationale for anonymity simply to make allowances for the disadvantaged and encourage as  many people as possible to use Inspire? An answer to this question will help me establish a line of arguing to my students as to how close to reality the system is. Incidentally, how would you account for the discrepancy between anonymity and the possibility of using Inspire  for supporting real-life negotiations? (Rainer Thormann, Chemnitz Technical University).

No, I don't think it does. There may be situations, however, when partners maintain anonymity or hide behind meaningless names. This can happen during auctions, for example.
     In virtual market place most negotiations are not and will not be anonymous. Inspire has not been designed to be used in real negotiations but for training and research purposes. The training aspect and the fact that the system has been designed in such a way so that it can be used by a very large number of people forced us to make several simplifications. At the same time, we think that the system has key features characteristic to future web-based negotiation support systems.
     The INSS system is more realistic (e.g., allows for specification of issues by users, addition of options, BATNA, and so on). It also is a lot more complex in terms of the negotiation management by its users. Please note, that if you wish to use INSS you will need to specify the case (or prepare your own which we make available to the INSS users), and provide both sides for the negotiation. At present we are not able to match students who want to use INSS because each group requests a different case. (Gregory Kersten, InterNeg)