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

摘要

Support for international negotiations requires integration ofdecision-theoretic approaches with communication facilities, anddifferent visualization modes. In addition, negotiation supportsystems (NSS) should also be tailored to different cultural andeducational backgrounds of their users. While there have been studieson cross-cultural negotiations involving simple game or economicmodels, there have been no experiments with NSS in international andcross-cultural contexts. At the same time the emergence and quicklyspreading use of the World Wide Web (WWW) and electronic commerceindicates the potential of NSS supporting commercial transactionsacross borders. This paper presents INSPIRE, the first Web-based NSSthat has been tested and used in teaching and training in severalcountries. Developed in the context of a cross-cultural study ofdecision making and negotiation, it has been primarily used toconduct and study negotiation via WWW as well as in teaching andtraining. The architecture of INSPIRE, which relies heavily on thenet-centric computing paradigm and object oriented design, is alsodiscussed.