Sunil J. Noronha

WWW-based negotiation support: design, implementation, and use

Support for international negotiations requires integration of decision-theoretic approaches with communication facilities, and different visualization modes. In addition, negotiation support systems (NSS) should also be tailored to different cultural and educational backgrounds of their users. While there have been studies on cross-cultural negotiations involving simple game or economic models, there have been no experiments with NSS in international and cross-cultural contexts. At the same time the emergence and quickly spreading use of the World Wide Web (WWW) and electronic commerce indicates the potential of NSS supporting commercial transactions across borders. This paper presents INSPIRE, the first Web-based NSS that has been tested and used in teaching and training in several countries. Developed in the context of a cross-cultural study of decision making and negotiation, it has been primarily used to conduct and study negotiation via WWW as well as in teaching and training. The architecture of INSPIRE, which relies heavily on the net-centric computing paradigm and object oriented design, is also discussed.

Negotiation via the World Wide Web: A cross-cultural study of decision making

INSPIRE is a Web-based system for the support and conduct of negotiations. The primary uses of the system are training and research. Between July 1996 and April 1997, 281 bilateral negotiations were conducted through the system by managers, engineers and students from over 50 countries. INSPIRE has been used at eight universities and training centers. In research it is being used to study cross-cultural differences in decision making and the use of computer support in negotiation. This paper outlines the system, the negotiation methodology embedded in it, and reports the initial results of the experimental study of the impact of culture on Web-based bilateral negotiation.

Opposition and Inefficiency in Negotiated Compromises

Several studies have shown that negotiators often do not reach efficient compromises. We analyze the circumstances under which rational agents make inefficient compromises and resist improvements. We do this by describing and interpreting various negotiation situations and by developing formal consturcts and theorems for determining the character of negotiation situation. Key among these concepts is the notion of opposition. The effects of various rationality assumptions on efficiency and ther implicatios for negotiation support systems are discussed.

Forest Fire Management with Negoplan

The control of forest fires is a complex domain that requires a variety of knowledge and skills in decision making and planning under uncertainty. It poses a challenging problem for the design of simulation and support systems, and therefore acts as a good testbed for the application of intelligent system methodologies. One such a methodology is restructurable modelling. It is the theoretical foundation of Negoplan, a software tool based on artificial intelligence technology, which can be used to build simulation, support and training systems for sequential decision making. Comprehensive support for fire management should reflect the different levels of an organizational hierarchy, from efficient resource allocation to policy setting and tradeoffs between goals. We show how the higher levels of fire management can be formulated as a sequential decision making problem and modelled in Negoplan.

Negoplan: A System for Logic-Based Decision Modelling

There have been several proposals for a logic of decision making. However, none has been accompanied by a working implementation of a logic-based decision simulation and support system. The Negoplan system has been used to represent and simulate sequential decision making problems and has demonstrated its effectiveness in a number of real-world applications. In this paper we view Negoplan as a logic-based programming language specialized for representing decision making concepts. We describe Negoplan from a formal logic perspective with the emphasis on modelling generic aspects of decision making, and we show how logic can be used to represent and reason with several of the most important constructs in decision making.

Performance modelling of service businesses

Business performance continues to be one of the principal subjects in enterprise operations. The evolution of the service economy brings renewed interest to the field of performance modelling. Senior managerial decision makers constantly seek to improve the performance of an organisation. Key areas of interest are what aspects of the business are important for successful performance, and how best to control them, e.g. what investments, resource allocations and other actions must they take to maximise business performance. Our ultimate goal is to develop quantitative models and associated methods or tools that will help high-level managers of services businesses improve their performance. We believe that most organisations could improve their understanding of what drives their performance by following a more rigorous methodology. In this paper, we explore the possibility of modelling performance through learning from a number of diverse technical areas and insights from decision makers of an existing servi...

Performance Modeling of Service Businesses

Business performance continues to be one of the principal subjects in enterprise operations. The evolution of the service economy brings renewed interest to the field of performance modeling. Senior managerial decision makers constantly seek to improve the performance of an organization. Key areas of interest are what aspects of the business are important for successful performance, and how best to control them, e.g., what investments, resource allocations, and other actions must they take to maximize business performance. Our ultimate goal is to develop quantitative models and associated methods or tools that will help high-level managers of services businesses improve their performance. We believe that most organizations could improve their understanding of what drives their performance by following a more rigorous methodology. In this paper, we explore the possibility of modeling performance through reviewing relevant work from several different technical areas and developing a preliminary approach based on our learning.