How do I tell you what I want? Agent’s interpretation of principal’s preferences and its impact on understanding the negotiation process and outcomes

Abstract

In this paper we analyze how the way in which the principal's preferences are visualized may affect the accuracy of representation of this principal by their agent. We study the processes of multi-issue electronic representative negotiations conducted by agents on behalf of their principals by means of the negotiation support system that implements a simple decision support tool for eliciting the preferences and building a system of cardinal ratings for feasible negotiation offers. First, we investigate the accuracy of agents' scoring systems and compare their concordance to the preferential information provided to them by their principals by means of single verbal description and two different visualization techniques, one using bar graphs and the second-circles (pies). The concordance is measured by means of the notions of ordinal and cardinal accuracy. Then we analyze how the scoring systems with various inaccuracy indexes influence the agents' perception of negotiation process, i.e. the interpretation of concessions made by parties and the structures of concession paths. We also study what is an impact of inaccurate scoring systems on the negotiation outcomes, i.e. the final contracts, their ratings and efficiency. The results obtained show that the bars are slightly better in more precise representation of principals preferences. They allow agent to determine a little more accurate scoring systems, which help to understand the negotiation process better by minimizing the cardinal error of evaluation of the offers in concession paths. Yet, no significant impact on the outcomes have been found. An interesting prescriptive conclusion that can be drawn is that to assure an adequate representation of principal's preferences the agents should be offered the bar-based visualization. Also, a checkup mechanism should be introduced to the preference elicitation procedure that assure the agents to be ordinally concordant with the priorities of their principal's preferences.

Holistic Preferences and Prenegotiation Preparation

“…Technically, the reference scoring systems in eNego were build based on the circle sizes and were considered to represent the principal's preferences in an ultraprecise way. Then the scoring system of each agent was compared to the reference scoring system of the corresponding principal using the notions of ordinal and cardinal accuracy (for details see Wachowicz et al 2019;Wachowicz and Roszkowska 2020):…”

Reducing Cognitive Effort in Scoring Negotiation Space Using the Fuzzy Clustering Model

“…Therefore, some notions and concepts that accept imprecision and ambiguity in defining the templates and scoring systems were proposed to be incorporated in prenegotiation to build the new support models that use the elements of fuzzy sets theory [7,8]. Unfortunately, the recent experiments on the prenegotiation support efficiency still report on the problems with an adequate template definition and scoring systems design, which is very often linked to the negotiators' limited cognitive capabilities, insufficient numerical intelligence, or information processing styles that are biased and prone to use heuristics instead of rational reasoning, and their negative impact on negotiation progress and results [9][10][11]. This shows a need for designing new, cognitively easier, and more accessible approaches to support negotiators in preference elicitation and evaluation (individual and mutual) of the negotiation space.…”

Fuzzy Representation of Principal’s Preferences in Inspire Negotiation Support System

“…Inspire is, for now, the software system most widely used in negotiation studies and research [6]. Many researchers use the experimental data from Inspire to study computer support in negotiation [5,7,8], behavioural aspects of decision making in negotiation [7,9,10], preference analysis [7,9,11,12], and cross-cultural differences in decision making [13] are among others.…”

“…Out of the visualisation methods mentioned above, circles are one of the most common [12]. They are popular in the negotiation support systems and were used first by Kersten in his Inspire system [13] and later in eNego [23].…”

“…Using circles to represent the preferences seems to be quite convenient and cognitively easy for principals. However, it may raise interpretational problems as the circles are two-dimensional [12,24,25]. This way of preference representation may also be linked to the imprecise perception of preferences by the principals themselves.…”