Przemysław Polak

On testing performance of a Negotiation procedure in distributed environment

Factors, which increase negotiation effectiveness challenge researchers to investigate methods supporting negotiation and to verify performance of negotiation support procedures. Increase of complexity of economic organizations as well as global range of their operation result in growing interest in negotiation involving remote parties coping with ambiguities of cross-cultural interactions. Trials to create distributed negotiation environment (DNE) answer the call for integrated set of tools, methods and procedures organized to support remote parties in negotiation. The DNE requires consideration of three functions of Distributed Negotiation Support System (d-NSS): communication, advice and mediation. Prototype d-NSS, which were presented in the literature, usually do not perform all three functions simultaneously. However, fully functional d-NSS should allow flexible switching between the three functions as well as to profit from the opportunity of their joint use. Such approach enables to reduce cost of tedious, expensive, time-consuming negotiation process. The paper reports on outcomes of a series of experiments dealing with DNE. The communication function was investigated in a distributed environment, initially asynchronous then synchronous. Advice and mediation functions were analyzed in experiments with well-structured data set. The results encourage efforts to include the issue of cautious use of a d-NSS in relevant cases as a topic in the pre-negotiation agenda.

Teaching computer communication skills using case study method

Modern management activities involve extensive usage of computer communication services. The poster summarizes experience in teaching these skills on the basis of case study method. Two scenarios of computer game involving extensive usage of communication software and implementation of group decision making model are presented.