Abstract
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in the specification, generation and exchange of business objects in the context of electronic commerce. Common business objects have been defined for product catalogs, purchase orders and other business entities. However, no business objects have been defined and implemented for supporting automated business negotiations even though business negotiation is very much an integral part of business activities. In this work, we have designed and implemented a set of business negotiation objects for supporting the bargaining type of business negotiations. These objects define the operations and information contents needed for negotiation parties to express their requirements and constraints during a bargaining process. They correspond to a set of negotiation primitives, which is a superset of the negotiation-related primitives defined in two popular languages: ACL and COOL. The implementation of these objects is patterned after the business object documents in the XML format proposed by the Open Applications Group, thus conforming to the established standard. The incorporation of several types of constraint specifications in these business negotiation objects provides the negotiation parties and the negotiation servers that represent them much expressive power in specifying call‐for‐proposals and proposals. Two synchronization problems and their solutions associated with the withdrawal and modification of negotiation proposals are addressed and presented in this paper. The use of these business negotiation objects in a bi‐lateral bargaining protocol is also presented. We have validated the utility of these objects in an integrated network environment, which consists of two replicated negotiation servers, two commercial products, and some other university research systems that form a supply chain.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adam, N. R., O. Dogramaci, A. Gangopadhyay, and Y. Yesha. (1999). Electronic Commerce: Technical, Business, and Legal Issues. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR.
Austin, J. L. (1962). How to Do Things with Words. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Barbuceanu, M., and M. S. Fox. (1995). “COOL: A Language for Describing Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems,” in Proceedings of the First International Conference on Multi-Agent Systems (ICMAS-95), San Francisco, CA, pp. 17-24.
Breslin, J. W., and J. Z. Rubin. (1991). Negotiation Theory and Practice. The Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA.
Bui, T., F. Bodard, and P.-C. Ma. (1997). “ARBAS: A Formal Language to Support Argumentation in Networkbased Organizations,” Journal of Management Information Systems 14(3), 223-237.
Chang, M.-K., and C. Woo. (1994). “A Speech-Act-Based Negotiation Protocol: Design, Implementation, and Test Use,” ACM Transaction on Information Systems 12(4), 360-382.
Collins, J., M. Tsvetovat, B. Mobasher, and M. Gini. (1998). “A Market Architecture for Multi-Agent Contracting,” in Second International Conference on Autonomous Agents.
Conklin, J., and M. L. Begeman. (1988). “gIBIS: A Hypertext Tool for Exploratory Policy Discussion,” ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 6(4), 303-331.
Feldman, S. (1998). “Research Directions in Electronic Commerce,” in Third USENIX Workshop on Electronic Commerce, Boston, MA.
Grosof, B. N., and Y. Labrou. (1999). “An Approach to using XML and a Rule-based Content Language with an Agent Communication Language,” in Proceedings of the IJCAI-99 Workshop on Agent Communication Languages (ACL-99), Stockholm, Sweden.
Hammer, J., C. Huang, Y. Huang, C. Pluempitiwiriyawej, M. Lee, H. Li, L. Wang, Y. Liu, and S. Y. W. Su. (2000). “The IDEAL Approach to Internet-Based Negotiation for E-Business,” in Proceedings of 16th International Conference on Data Engineering, San Diego, CA.
Huang, C. (2000). “A Web-based Negotiation Server for Supporting Electronic Commerce,” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.
Jackson, S., and S. Jacobs. (1980). “Structure of Conversational Argument: Pragmatic Bases for the Enthymeme,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 66, 251-265.
Kalakota, R., and A. B. Whinston. (1996). Frontiers of Electronic Commerce. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, Inc.
Kersten, G. E., and S. J. Noronha. (1999). “WWW-based Negotiation Support: Design, Implementation, and Use,” Decision Support Systems 25, 135-154.
Kunz, W., and H. Rittel. (1970). “Issues as Elements of Information Systems,” Working Paper 131, Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California, Berkeley, CA.
Lee, J. G., J. Y. Kang, and E. S. Lee. (1997). “ICOMA: An Open Infrastructure for Agent-based Intelligent Electronic Commerce on the Internet,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Parallel and Distributed Systems (ICPADS), Seoul, Korea, pp. 648-655.
Li, H., S. Y. W. Su, H. Lam, and Y. Huang. (2001). “Automated E-business Negotiation: Model, Life Cycle and System Architecture,” Technical Report, UF-CISE TR01-005. CISE Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. Available at: ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/cis/tech-reports/tr01/tr01-005.pdf.
Lim, L., and I. Benbasat. (1993). “A Theoretical Perspective of Negotiation Support Systems,” Journal of Management Information Systems 9(3), 27-44.
Liu Y., C. Pluempitiwiriyawej, Y. Shi, H. Lam, S. Y. W. Su, and H. Chan. (2001). “A Rule Warehouse System for Knowledge Sharing and Business Collaboration,” Technical Report, UF-CISE TR01-006. CISE Department, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida. Available at: ftp://ftp.cise.ufl.edu/cis/tech-reports/tr01/tr01-006.pdf.
Marriott, K., and P. J. Stuckey. (1998). Programming with Constraints: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Müller, H. J. (1996). “Negotiation Principles,” Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence, in G. M. P. O'Hare, and N. R. Jennings (eds.), New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Myerson, R. B., and M. A. Satterthwaite. (1983). “Efficient Mechanisms for Bilateral Trading,” Journal of Economic Theory 29, 265-281.
Pruitt, D. G. (1981). Negotiation Behavior. New York: Academic Press.
Raiffa, H. (1982). The Art and Science of Negotiation. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Rangaswamy, A., and G. R. Shell. (1997). “Using Computers to Realize Joint Gains in Negotiations: Toward an ‘Electronic Bargaining Table,'” Management Science 43(8), 1147-1163.
Reich, B., and I. Ben-Shaul. (1998). “A Componentized Architecture for Dynamic Electronic Markets,” SIGMOD Record 27(4).
Rosenschein, J. S., and G. Zlotkin. (1994). Rules of Encounter: Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation among Computers. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
Rubinstein, A. (1982). “Perfect Equilibrium in a Bargaining Model,” Econometrica 50, 97-110.
Sandholm, T., and V. Lesser. (1995). “Issues in Automated Negotiation and Electronic Commerce: Extending the Contract Net Framework,” First International Conference on Multiagent Systems (ICMAS-95), San Francisco, CA, pp. 328-335.
Searle, J. E. (1975). “A Taxonomy of Illocutionary Acts,” in K. Gunderson (ed.), Language, Mind and Knowledge, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 7. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 344-369.
Searle, J. E. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Shepherd, A., N. Mayer, and A. Kuchinsky. (1990). “Strudel — An Extensible Electronic Conversation Toolkit,” CSCW'90 Proceedings, New York: ACM Press, pp. 93-104.
Ståhl, I. (1972). Bargaining Theory. The Economics Research Institute, Stockholm, Sweden.
Su, S. Y. W., C. Huang, and J. Hammer. (2000). “A Replicable Web-based Negotiation Server for E-Commerce,” Proceedings of Thirty-third Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences (HICSS-33), Maui, Hawaii.
Su, S. Y. W., C. Huang, J. Hammer, Y. Huang, H. Li, L. Wang, Y. Liu, C. Pluempitiwiriyawej, M. Lee, and H. Lam. (2001). “An Internet-Based Negotiation Server for E-Commerce,” The VLDB Journal 10(1), 72-90.
Tsang, E. (1993). Foundation of Constraint Satisfaction. New York: Academic Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Li, H., Huang, C., Su, S.Y. et al. Design and Implementation of Business Objects for Automated Business Negotiations. Group Decision and Negotiation 11, 23–44 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014513300361
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014513300361