On the e-negotiation of unmatched logrolling views

Abstract

An e-negotiation process comprises computer-facilitated tasks, each of which aims at resolving an issue or a collection of co-related issues under negotiation. It involves an iterative decision process in which two or more parties make individual decisions and interact with each other, aiming to arrive at a contract. In each iterative decision process, a party makes offers or counter offers that may reflect tradeoffs of some issues. Tradeoff evaluation often requires logrolling, which refers to the exchange of loss in some issues for gain in others. The set of issues involved in a logrolling process is referred to as logrolling set. A typical negotiation involves multiple logrolling processes. The logrolling sets exercised by a negotiation party in these processes constitute one logrolling view. Problems arise when parties have unmatched logrolling views. Alternative offers or counter offers that refer to one logrolling view can be difficult to interpret under a different logrolling view. In this paper, motivated by an e-negotiation example of a lease contract template, we formulate a meta-model of unmatched logrolling views, examine the involved e-negotiation process, and propose a mechanism for building an e-negotiation support system (eNSS) to facilitate the process, without the need of formulating utility functions. As a result, e-negotiation across parties with unmatched logrolling views can be streamlined.