Henner Gimpel

PANDA: Specifying Policies for Automated Negotiations of Service Contracts

The Web and Grid services frameworks provide a promising infrastructure for cross-organizational use of online services. The use of services in large-scale and cross-organizational environments requires the negotiation of agreements that define these services. Buying at a fine granularity just when a need arises is only feasible if the costs of establishing new agreements are low. Today, negotiation is often a manual process yet many simple online services would allow full or partial automation. The PANDA approach automates decision-making and proposes to specify a negotiation policy, expressing a party’s private negotiation strategy, by combining rules and utility functions. In addition, the decision-making problem can be decomposed into different aspects that can be executed by different interacting decision-makers. Using PANDA for policy specification and negotiation decision-making reduces the costs of setting up new services and contracts. Hence, the use of fine-grained on-demand services becomes feasible.

Template-Based automated service provisioning – supporting the agreement-driven service life-cycle

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a vital instrument in service-oriented architectures to reserve service capacity at a defined service quality level. Provisioning systems enable service managers to automatically configure resources such as servers, storage, and routers based on a configuration specification. Hence, agreement provisioning is a vital step in managing the life-cycle of agreement-driven services. Deriving detailed resource quantities from arbitrary SLA specifications is a difficult task and requires detailed models of algorithmic behavior of service implementations and capacity of a – potentially heterogeneous – resource environment, which are typically not available today. However, if we look at, e.g., data centers today, system administrators often know the quality-of-service properties of known system configurations and modifications thereof and can write the corresponding provisioning specifications. This paper proposes an approach that leverages the knowledge of existing data center configurations, defines templates of provisioning specifications, and rules on how to fill these templates based on a SLA specification. The approach is agnostic to the specific SLA language and provisioning specification format used, if based on XML.

How (not) to Incent Crowd Workers - Payment Schemes and Feedback in Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing gains momentum: In digital work places such as Amazon Mechanical Turk, oDesk, Clickworker, 99designs, or InnoCentive it is easy to distribute human work to hundreds or thousands of freelancers. In these crowdsourcing settings, one challenge is to properly incent worker effort to create value. Common incentive schemes are piece rate payments and rank-order tournaments among workers. Tournaments might or might not disclose a worker’s current competitive position via a leaderboard. Following an exploratory approach, we derive a model on worker performance in rank-order tournaments and present a series of real effort studies using experimental techniques on an online labor market to test the model and to compare dyadic tournaments to piece rate payments. Data suggests that on average dyadic tournaments do not improve performance compared to a simple piece rate for simple and short crowdsourcing tasks. Furthermore, giving feedback on the competitive position in such tournaments tends to be negatively related to workers’ performance. This relation is partially mediated by task completion and moderated by the provision of feedback: When playing against strong competitors, feedback is associated with workers quitting the task altogether and, thus, showing lower performance. When the competitors are weak, workers tend to complete the task but with reduced effort. Overall, individual piece rate payments are most simple to communicate and implement while incenting performance is on par with more complex dyadic tournaments.

Market Engineering: A Research Agenda

Market engineering is the discipline of making markets work. It encompasses the use of legal frameworks, economic mechanisms, management science models, and information and communication technologies for the purposes of: (i) designing and constructing forums where goods and services can be bought and sold and (ii) providing services associated with buying and selling. Against this background, this paper sets out the need for a coherent and encompassing agenda in this area and highlights the key constituent building blocks.

Preferences in Negotiations : The Attachment Effect

Theories on Preferences.- Preferences in Negotiations.- Internet Experiment.- Laboratory Experiment.- Conclusions and Future Work.

Design Blueprint for Stress-Sensitive Adaptive Enterprise Systems

Stress is a major problem in the human society, impairing the well-being, health, performance, and productivity of many people worldwide. Most notably, people increasingly experience stress during human-computer interactions because of the ubiquity of and permanent connection to information and communication technologies. This phenomenon is referred to as technostress. Enterprise systems, designed to improve the productivity of organizations, frequently contribute to this technostress and thereby counteract their objective. Based on theoretical foundations and input from exploratory interviews and focus group discussions, the paper presents a design blueprint for stress-sensitive adaptive enterprise systems (SSAESes). A major characteristic of SSAESes is that bio-signals (e.g., heart rate or skin conductance) are integrated as real-time stress measures, with the goal that systems automatically adapt to the users’ stress levels, thereby improving human-computer interactions. Various design interventions on the individual, technological, and organizational levels promise to directly affect stressors or moderate the impact of stressors on important negative effects (e.g., health or performance). However, designing and deploying SSAESes pose significant challenges with respect to technical feasibility, social and ethical acceptability, as well as adoption and use. Considering these challenges, the paper proposes a 4-stage step-by-step implementation approach. With this Research Note on technostress in organizations, the authors seek to stimulate the discussion about a timely and important phenomenon, particularly from a design science research perspective.

Multi-attribute double auctions in financial trading

Double-sided auctions are popular market mechanisms for determining the price of standardized commodities. However, many trades - like for example OTC trades of financial derivatives and bonds - require multi-attribute handling. To this end, the class of continuous-time multi-attribute double auction mechanisms is introduced. The paper outlines requirements, characterizes the class of auction mechanisms, points out design options, and discusses the implementation in the meet2trade/sup 2/ system.

Towards Multi‐Attribute Double Auctions for Financial Markets

Technological progress has led to electronic exchanges attracting a major part of transaction volume for standardized stocks. In the field of derivatives and bonds, electronic exchanges failed to prosper and so called over‐the‐counter (OTC) trading is predominant: possibly because multi‐attribute assets are hard to trade in structured two‐sided markets. The present paper aims at alleviating this shortcoming. The present work follows the market engineering approach and presents a class of double auction mechanisms that is able to handle multiple attributes – the inherent potential of these mechanisms can be utilized in additional products to reduce search and coordination costs by equating supply and demand centrally. The mechanisms are individually rational, Pareto optimal, coalition proof and budget‐balanced. As a proof of concept and to illustrate feasibility, the mechanisms are implemented in the meet2trade system.

Stratified prevention: opportunities and limitations. Report on the 1st interdisciplinary cardiovascular workshop in Augsburg

Sufficient exercise and sleep, a balanced diet, moderate alcohol consumption and a good approach to handle stress have been known as lifestyles that protect health and longevity since the Middle Age. This traditional prevention quintet, turned into a sextet by smoking cessation, has been the basis of the “preventive personality” that formed in the twentieth century. Recent analyses of big data sets including genomic and physiological measurements have unleashed novel opportunities to estimate individual health risks with unprecedented accuracy, allowing to target preventive interventions to persons at high risk and at the same time to spare those in whom preventive measures may not be needed or even be harmful. To fully grasp these opportunities for modern preventive medicine, the established healthy life styles require supplementation by stratified prevention. The opportunities of these developments for life and health contrast with justified concerns: A “surveillance society”, able to predict individual behaviour based on big data, threatens individual freedom and jeopardises equality. Social insurance law and the new German Disease Prevention Act (Präventionsgesetz) rightly stress the need for research to underpin stratified prevention which is accessible to all, ethical, effective, and evidence based. An ethical and acceptable development of stratified prevention needs to start with autonomous individuals who control and understand all information pertaining to their health. This creates a mandate for lifelong health education, enabled in an individualised form by digital technology. Stratified prevention furthermore requires the evidence-based development of a new taxonomy of cardiovascular diseases that reflects disease mechanisms. Such interdisciplinary research needs broad support from society and a better use of biosamples and data sets within an updated research governance framework.

Cognitive Biases in Negotiation Processes

Negotiating parties oftentimes do not reach mutually beneficial agreements. A considerable body of research on negotiation analysis compiled a set of so called common biases in negotiations that systematically affect the cognition and behavior of negotiators and thereby influence agreements. The present work presents these cognitive biases in the context of a process model for bilateral negotiations which stems from information systems research.