Multi-issue negotiations present opportunities for tradeoffs that create gains for one or more parties without causing any party to be worse off. The literature suggests that parties are often unable to identity and capitalize on such trades. We present a Negotiation Support System, called NEGOTIATION ASSISTANT, that enables negotiators to analyze their own preferences and provides a structured negotiation process to help parties move toward optimal trades. The underlying model is based on a multi-attribute representation of preferences and communications over a computer network where offers and counter-offers are evaluated according to one's own preferences. The parties can send and receive both formal offers and informal messages. If and when agreement is reached, the computer evaluates the agreement and suggests improvements based on the criteria of Pareto-superiority. In this paper, we motivate the system, present its analytical foundations, discuss its design and development, and provide an assessment of its "value-in-use" based on controlled experiments. Our results strongly suggest that parties using the system in structured negotiation settings would achieve better outcomes than parties negotiating face-to-face or over an e-mail messaging facility, other things being equal. For example, only 4 of the 34 dyads (11.1%) negotiating a simulated sales transaction face-to-face or over e-mail reached an "integrative" settlement, as compared with 29 of the 68 dyads (42.6%) using NEGOTIATION ASSISTANT. Systems such as NEGOTIATION ASSISTANT have the potential to be used in emerging "electronic markets. "
Many negotiation courses and executive training programs cover the subject of bargaining styles. The Thomas-Kilmann Conflict Mode Instrument (TKI) is a commonly used psychological assessment tool that helps students and teachers probe this topic. The TKI measures the five conflict management facets proposed by the Dual Concerns Model: competing, collaborating, compromising, accommodating, and avoiding. The author has used the TKI extensively in teaching executives about bargaining styles, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of it as a teaching aid. He also presents research on the frequency with which various TKI scores are reported in business programs. Finally, he provides thumbnail sketches of typical bargaining behavior exhibited by people with very strong and very weak predispositions for each of the five conflict modes. Some implications of these behaviors for specific professional audiences are explored.
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