Business and personal interactions increasingly take place online. Such interactions vary from personal communications (e.g. using email, twitter, skype) to formal organisational processes such as procurement, sale, or marketing. What they have in common is that they all deal with communication of different sorts. Concentrating on the business context, communication gets more structured. Mutual understanding becomes a prime goal in order to enable effective business interactions. Electronic negotiations are an archetype of organizational communication processes that involve decision making and conflict management at the same time. Whilst negotiators in organisational e-negotiation processes might use general communication systems such as email or skype, there are also systems that are more specifically targeted at e-negotiations. They can be support tools as part of business systems or dedicated electronic support systems (NSSs). NSSs support communication, decision making, document management, and/or conflict resolution in business contexts. Over the past decades, we have seen sophisticated NSSs that provide holistic support of all of the above negotiation elements. They have been tested in various experiments and have been shown to improve both process and outcome.
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