| Summary: | 博士 === 國立交通大學 === 經營管理研究所 === 94 === In the past few years, the footprints of e-commerce are ubiquitous and range from simple web shopping to complex virtual partnership construction through the Internet. Faced with diverse user groups, different trading models have been developed in e-commerce as well, including posted-price selling, auction and negotiation. Of the three models, negotiation is undoubtedly the most complicated one and is essential for a certain types of trading. However, at present, there is no evidence to show a widespread adoption of negotiation in e-commerce. It implies the techniques of assisting people to conduct negotiations in e-commerce need to be further investigated.
To popularize the negotiation-type trading in e-commerce, software packages that help the users completing the preparation work and guiding the negotiation process are indispensable. For this purpose, computer-aided negotiation support systems can serve as effective tools to assist the negotiators. In particular, modern negotiation support systems benefit from the remarkable computation power of computers and possibly provide the negotiators with more comprehensive and sound suggestions than the human think-tank does. However, the success of applying negotiation support systems to e-commerce does not only depend on the efficiency of computers but also on the quality of support to which the support system really contribute.
To provide effective negotiation support in e-commerce, in this thesis, several novel techniques are proposed for the following three important subjects: (1)deriving accurate and reasonable aspiration utilities for negotiators to help them establish precise goals before negotiation, (2)providing a reliable prediction of outcome of a negotiation to help the participants achieving a better settlement, (3) establishing a complete evaluation of the negotiation tactics to convince the users of relying the automated negotiation framework.
To assist a negotiator in determining a precise aspiration utility before negotiation, an analytical approach based on the additive scoring model is proposed in our work. A series of simulation-based analyses were performed on two-party multi-issue negotiations. The results show that it is possible to determine a range for an aspiration utility without knowing the preferences of either side. Furthermore, if the preference of one side had been identified before negotiation, the results can be further restricted in a narrower range.
To predict the outcome of two-party multi-issue automated negotiations, we first demonstrate the area of the settlement space is positively correlated to the possibility of settlement and the final joint utility, whereas it is negatively correlated to the negotiation period. Next, we show how to correlate the combination of an issue’s weight assignment for both sides with the area of the settlement space. Thus, the outcome of a negotiation can be estimated by calculating the area of the settlement space.
Based on the negotiation model proposed by Faratin et al. (1998), this thesis also examines the performance of automated negotiation tactics and intends to provide concise suggestions for the users of automated negotiation systems. First, a theoretical analysis is provided for behavior-dependent tactics. Useful conclusions are obtained when single-issue negotiations are considered. Next, a new framework for applying tactics derived from single-issue negotiations to multi-issue negotiations is proposed and discussed. Finally, different from the previous work, exhaustive simulations based on two-issue negotiations are performed to evaluate the effectiveness of behavior-dependent and time-dependent tactics. The experimental results show that a relatively win-win settlement could be achieved when both sides use the same tactic. And, a simple tit-for-tat tactic would obtain better results than others.
keywords: Negotiation Tactics and Strategies, Aspiration Utility, Prediction of Negotiation Outcome, Negotiation Support, Additive Scoring Model, E-commerce
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