Browsing by Subject "Verhandlung"

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Electronic negotiation support systems and their role in business communication : an exploratory evaluation of auction use
(2007) Köhne, Frank; Schoop, Mareike
Electronic communication media and electronic commerce have become substantial components of economic interaction. Buyers and consumers are increasingly integrated in processes of product and service specification. More and more coordination processes are conducted digitally or partly automated. Buyer-supplier relationships change. In the post-hype phase regarding online-auctions long term relationships prevail ? however, the electronic communication via e-mail as well as the different types of reverse auction have been established as business processes. The dissertation contributes to an understanding of the appropriation and use processes of electronic procurement auctions, i.e. the only form of electronic negotiation with sufficient market-penetration for a field study. Consequently, it explicates the effects of the technology in its application context. The focus of the study is on an aspect, which is hardly suitable for experimental analysis: the identification and contextualisation of organisational communication effects. It shows how auction systems can generate efficiencies as well as relational threats and communicative barriers. The latter is mainly achvied through references to the theory of Habermas. Based on the field study, conclusions for the adequate design and choice of negotiation support technology are drawn.
Entscheidungsorientierte Bewertung von Alternativen in Verhandlungsprozessen
(2022) Heinle, Timo; Troßmann, Ernst
Negotiations take place within and between all possible types of businesses. They not only shape private and public households, but they are also an elementary component in everyday business life. The main focus is on negotiations in make-to-order-production that take place between two companies. In the case of make-to-order-production the project character is important, which is reflected on the one hand in the high level of customer-related service specifications, and on the other hand in the low standardization of the drafting of contracts. To be able to draft the contracts, more or less extensive negotiations between the contracting parties, in which an attempt is made to reach an agreement on the relevant subjects of the negotiation, are usual. At different points in the negotiation process the negotiating parties must make a large number of decisions. If in such cases the negotiators only focus on the outcome of the negotiations, there is a risk of protracted negotiations with high costs. Such an approach is not compatible with a conventional operational target system. When considering the negotiation costs, it may be preferable to accept an allegedly worse offer in order to avoid further rounds of negotiations and the associated costs. Negotiation decisions, depending on the time the decision is made, can be characterized by a multitude of different alternatives. In any event, before a negotiation begins, it must be decided whether entering into a negotiation rather than the renunciation of a common agreement is preferable. If the negotiating parties are already negotiating, a decision on whether to accept or reject an existing offer is imperative. Breaking off a negotiation and the subsequent failure to reach an agreement is an alternative that regularly exists up until shortly before a contract is agreed on. To be able to make a choice, a decision-oriented valuation of alternatives in negotiation processes is necessary. The methodological apparatus designed in this dissertation enables a decision-oriented valuation of negotiation alternatives by the supplier in make-to-order-production. This allows negotiators to check at any time during a negotiation whether the intended negotiation alternative is the most appropriate or whether another negotiation alternative is relatively advantageous due to updated environmental conditions and updated levels of information.
Kooperation oder Konfrontation? Die Wirkung von Commitment, Empowerment, Emotion und Kritik in Verhandlung und Mediation
(2019) Hartmann-Piraudeau, Andrea; Brettschneider, Frank
The present work examines the effects of commitment, empowerment, anger, happiness and criticism by means of computer-based negotiation in the laboratory. In negotiation and mediation research, only a few experimental studies exist on the mechanisms of these conditions or interventions in a negotiation context with a mediator or a mediating third party. Usually, the results of experimental negotiation studies are based on classical two-party negotiations. With the research question of how the interventions of a mediator affect the negotiation process and the selected topics commitment, empowerment, emotions and criticism, a scientific contribution to the research of the effect of media-tion should be made. This is relevant because conflicts in society are less and less resolved by power. This development can be seen in different fields of social life In the first part of the work, mediation and negotiation are described as procedures for dealing with conflicts of interest and their similarities and differences are worked out. The state of research on the mechanisms of mediation in general and specifically on the research topics of Commitment, Empowerment, Emotions and Critique forms the theoretical basis of the work. Subsequently, the specific experimental conditions are discussed and the extent to which the negotiation situation in the laboratory can be transferred to the mediation context is worked out. 186 participants took part in the negotiation and were then questioned by questionnaire. The effects of the different test conditions on the willingness to cooperate, the agreement rate, the evaluation of the negotiating partner, the emotions experienced during the negotiation and the evaluation of the mediator were examined. The negotiating movements of the individual groups were compared against two reference groups and evaluated according to the principle of "match and mismatch" (Pruitt and Syna 1985; Benton et al. 1972). There were statistically significant differences between the experimental groups: All in all, those groups that were confronted with anger or criticism agreed faster. In the case of the condition "anger", concessions - analogous to previous attempts (without mediator) - can be seen as a strategic approach. The anger of the negotiating partner was evaluated by the test persons as an indication of their negotiating limits. In order to avoid an escalation or even a break, the participants reacted with concessions, even if they were not happy and felt negative. If the mediator criticised the course of the negotiations, a similar effect resulted: the participants in this group reached agreement more frequently than in other groups. However, the motivation for the concession was not based on strategic considerations, but on the uncertainty triggered by the mediators intervention, and was accompanied by strong negative emotions of its own, which were projected onto all participants. Below-average cooperative behaviour and below-average agreement rates indicate the experimental conditions of "confidence" and "empowerment". The difference between the two conditions lies above all in the emotion experienced and the assessment of the negotiating partner. If the test persons were given "confidence" by their negotiating partner, they reacted in an above-average good mood, little anxious and confident and found their negotiating partner sympathetic and cheerful. In the "Empowerment" group, the mediator induced his own encouraging comments. In addition to the restrained cooperation, these triggered a rather average emotional response, and the mediator was rated as "unhelpful". The analysis shows that the test persons interpreted the confidence of the negotiating partner analogously to the condition "anger" as a sign of his satisfaction with the progress of the negotiation. Accordingly, they saw no strategic necessity to show increased cooperation. In the empowerment of the mediator, the restraint is also based on the fact that the mediator as an external third party evaluates the progress positively. This is interpreted as an indication that there is no danger of escalation or abortion in the room and that the situation does not require increased concessions. However, the subjects were less positive in this condition and were more critical of the mediators intervention. There are indications that the test persons felt restricted in their self-determination. The test condition "Commitment" examines the effect on the demand of a written commitment of the test persons before the beginning of the negotiation. The agreement rate as well as the cooperation behaviour remained rather average. One conspicuous feature of the group analysed, however, is the high number of words used in the comments during the negotiation compared to the other groups. The request to write a first comment significantly increased the communicativeness in the course of the procedure and led to positive emotions among the test persons and an equally positive attribution of the negotiating partners. In addition to descriptive observation, data analysis and interpretation, recommendations for action in mediation practice were derived from the results for each group.
Sentiment analysis in electronic negotiations
(2017) Körner, Michael; Schoop, Mareike
The thesis analyzes the applicability of methods of Sentiment Analysis and Predictive Analytics on textual communication in electronic negotiation transcripts. In particular, the thesis focuses on examining whether an automatic classifier can predict the outcome of ongoing, asynchronous electronic negotiations with sufficient accuracy. When combined with influencing factors leading to the specific classification decision, such a classification model could be incorporated into a Negotiation Support System in order to proactively intervene in ongoing negotiations it judges as likely to fail and then to give advice to the negotiators to prevent negotiation failure. To achieve this goal, an existing data set of electronic negotiations was used in a first study to create a Sentiment Lexicon, which tracks verbal indicators for utterances of positive and, respectively, negative polarity. This lexicon was subsequently combined with a simplified, feature-based representation of electronic negotiation transcripts which was then used as training data for various machine learning classifiers in order to let them determine the outcome of the negotiations based on the transcripts in a second study. Here, complete negotiation transcripts were classified as well as partial transcrips in order to assess classification quality in ongoing negotiations. The third study of the thesis sought to refine the classification model with respect to sentence-based granularity. To this end, human coders were classifying negotiation sentences regarding their subjectivity and polarity. The results of this content analysis approach were then used to train sentence-level subjectivity and polarity classifiers. The fourth and final study analyzed different aggregation methods for these sentence-level classification results in order to support the classifiers on negotiation granularity. Different aggregation and classification models were discussed, applied to the negotiation data and subsequently evaluated. The results of the studies show that it is possible to a certain degree to use a sentiment-based representation of negotiation data to automatically determine negotiation outcomes. In combination with the sentence-based classification models, negotiation classification quality increased further. However, this improvement was only found to be significant for complete negotiation transcripts. If only partial transcripts are used – specifically to simulate an ongoing negotiation scenario – the models tend to behave more erratic and classifcation quality depletes. This result yields the assumption that polarized utterances (positive as well as negative) only carry unequivocal information (with respect to the outcome) towards the end of the negotiation. During the negotiation, the influence of these utterances becomes more ambiguous, hence decreasing classification accuracy on models using a representation based on sentiments. Regarding the original goal of the thesis, which is to provide a basic means to support ongoing negotiations, this means that supporting mechanisms employed by a Negotiation Support System should focus on moderation techniques and resolving of potentially conflicting situations. Approaches that could be used to employ further conflict diagnosis in interaction with the negotiators are given in the final chapter of the thesis, as well as a discussion of potential recommendations and advice the system could give and lastly, approaches to visualize the classification data to the negotiators.