On automated e-business negotiations: Goal, policy, strategy, and plans of decision and action

In recent years, there has been increasing interest in automated e-business negotiations. The automation of negotiation requires a decision model to capture the negotiation knowledge of policymakers and negotiation experts so that the decision-making process can be carried out automatically. Current research on automated e-business negotiations has focused on defining low-level tactics (or negotiation rules) so that automated negotiation systems can carry out automated negotiation processes. These low-level tactics are usually defined from a technical perspective, not from a business perspective. There is a gap between high-level business negotiation goals and lowlevel tactics. In this article, we distinguish the concepts of negotiation context, negotiation goals, negotiation strategy, and negotiation tactics and introduce a formal decision model to show the relations among these concepts. We show how high-level negotiation goals can be formally mapped to low-level tactics that can be used to affect the behavior of a negotiation system during the negotiation process. In business, a business organization faces different negotiation situations (or contexts) and determines different sets of goals for different negotiation contexts. In our decision model, a business policymaker sets negotiation goals from different perspectives, which are called goal dimensions. A negotiation policy is a functional mapping from a negotiation context to some quantitative measures (or goal values) for the goal dimensions to express how competitive the policymaker wants to reach that set of goals. A negotiation expert who has the experience and expertise to conduct negotiations would define the negotiation strategies needed for reaching the negotiation goals. Formally, a negotiation strategy is a functional mapping from a set of goal values to a set of decision-action rules that implement negotiation tactics. The selected decision-action rules can then be used to control the execution of an automated negotiation system, which conducts a negotiation on behalf of a business organization. JOURNAL OF ORGANIZATIONAL COMPUTING AND ELECTRONIC COMMERCE 13(1), 1–29 (2006)