Today, in the online first option, the latest paper of the N.EA team was published in Operational Research. International Journal (IF = 1,816). The paper, entitled: "How do I tell you what I want? Agent’s interpretation of the principal’s preferences and its impact on understanding the negotiation process and outcomes", discusses an issue of representative negotiations conducted by agents for their principals.
In the manuscript, Tomasz Wachowicz, Gregory Kersten and Ewa Roszkowska are analyzing an impact of the way the preference information is imparted by principals to their agents, on the quality of the prenegotiation preparation conducted by the latter. Furthermore, the effects of such preparation on the understanding of the negotiation process, its dynamics, and the outcome is analyzed.
The paper describes the results of the bilateral negotiation experiments conducted in the Inspire negotiation support system. In Inspire, the predefined negotiation case was implemented, in which the preferential information of principals was defined and visualized in two different ways. The results, yet not univocal, show that the bar charts represent the principal's preferences somewhat better than the pie charts. The necessity of implementing some additional check-up mechanisms for the validation of the prenegotiation preparation is also indicated, which could help the agents to determine better negotiation offer scoring system (reflect the principal's preferences more accurately). In particular, the errors in the preference declarations should be tracked by some facilitation tools at the ordinal level, and if found, the agents should be encouraged to rethink the scoring systems they built and re-evaluate the negotiation template. This is because the experiment shows that the agents who understand their principals' preferences accurately at the ordinal level, are able to determine the scoring systems reliably representing also the cardinality of the principal's preferences and, consequently, evaluate the negotiation process and progress more adequately. In particular, they far more correctly interpret the concessions made by their counterparts than the ordinally inaccurate agents.
The paper is accessible as Open Access on the Springer website:
