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

Support for international negotiations requires integration of decision-theoretic approaches with communication facilities, and different visualization modes. In addition, NSS should also be tailored to different cultural and educational backgrounds of their users. While there have been studies on cross-cultural negotiations involving simple game or economic models, there have been no experiments with NSS in international and cross-cultural contexts. At the same time the emergence and quickly spreading use of the WWW and electronic commerce indicates the potential of NSS supporting commercial transactions across borders. This paper presents INSPIRE, the first Web-based negotiation support system that has been tested and used in teaching and training in several countries. The architecture of INSPIRE, which relies heavily on the netcentric computing paradigm and object oriented design, is also discussed.