Negotiation Support in Electronic Commerce using Fuzzy Membership Functions and AHP

In this study, we proposed a Fuzzy and AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process)-based negotiation support mechanism (FAHP-NEGO) to support the dynamic negotiation in Electronic Commerce (EC). Most of former researches proposed the negotiation support mechanisms, which were based on quantitative conditions only. In real-world case, however, it was crucial to have qualitative negotiation conditions such as relative preference, trust, and way of payment. To overcome these limitations, we combined AHP and fuzzy membership function into hybrid negotiation mechanism FAHP-NEGO. AHP was known as an effective mechanism to estimate the users’ relative preference among alternatives (offers). In addition, fuzzy membership function could reflect the user’s individual cognition for specific domain. In this study, AHP was used to estimate the buyer’s relative preference for each offer from sellers. Then, fuzzy membership function represented the buyer/seller’s cognition for each condition such as quantity, price, quality, and delivery. In the implementation process, a hypothetical data for healthcare products purchase was given to illustrate the negotiation quality of FAHP-NEGO. The results showed that the FAHP-NEGO mechanism could reflect both qualitative and quantitative efficiently.