Supporting ill-structured negotiation problems

Abstract

The negotiation is a complex decision-making process in which two or more parties talk with one another in afford to resolve their opposing interests. It can be divided into consecutive stages, namely: pre-negotiation phase involving structuring the problem and the analysis of preferences, the intention phase involving the iterative exchange of offers and counter-offers, and the postoptimization phase aiming at the improvement of the agreement obtained in the intention phase. In this chapter, we focus on the analysis of negotiators preferences in ill-structured negotiation problems. We employ the modified FTOPSIS approach and the AHP method for determining the negotiation offers scoring system, which allows for the easy evaluation of both the incoming offers as well as the packages under preparation. The imprecision and vagueness of the packages and option descriptions is modeled by the fuzzy triangular numbers. The Analytic Hierarchy Process is used to derive the negotiation issue weights instead of directly assigning such values to the issues (a classic approach). The FTOPSIS method is used to build the final scoring system allowing for the evaluation of any potential negotiation package. The whole process of negotiation supported by the approach we proposed is illustrated with an numerical example. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.