Situated Decision Support Approach for Managing Multiple Negotiations

Abstract

Negotiations as a flexible market mechanism has an advantage of discovering the value of offered products and services in interaction with the customer. However, the effort required from the human negotiators in handling ongoing interactions could offset the potential benefits. Automated negotiations by intelligent agents aim at alleviating this effort by autonomous execution of particular negotiation tasks. In many cases, though this approach may not be adequate as there is often the necessity to control the processes and outcomes reached by the negotiating agents, as well as factor in external unstructured information and human judgment in the process. This work applies the framework for situated decision support system (SDSS) to the problem of managing multiple on-going negotiations. The approach is illustrated through simulation experiments. The results show that the flexible SDSS-based approach could lead to adaptive process and more superior outcomes as compared to the fixed price mechanism.