THE WEB BASED SYSTEM FOR RECORDING AND ANALYSING

DIFFERENT KINDS OF NEGOTIATIONS

Michal Piotrowski

Faculty of Electronics, Telecommunications and Informatics of Gdansk University of Technology

ul. Gabriela Narutowicza 11/12, 80-952 Gdansk Wrzeszcz, Poland

Beata Krawczyk-Brylka

Faculty of Management and Economics of Gdansk University of Technology

ul. Gabriela Narutowicza 11/12, 80-952 Gdansk Wrzeszcz, Poland

Keywords:

Internet technology, negotiations, team work, enterprises, web system.

Abstract:

Negotiations are a base of various human and electronic activities. The paper describes a web based system for

recording, analysing and supporting some steps of negotiations. It also discusses several, fundamental prob-

lems of implementation of the system. To show its usability, some experiments and outcomes of negotiation

processes are demonstrated. Two kinds of negotiations (f2f and cmn) where analysed and the essential drivers

are pointed out and discussed.

1 INTRODUCTION

Nowadays most of professional human enterprises

are performed by teams, where important activities

and decisions are taken by negotiations (Krawczyk-

Brylka and Piotrowski, 2004; Unsworth and West,

1999). Negotiation is a process that occurs between

at least two competing parties who discuss a certain

topic. The topic is an object of the real world that

parties have interest in. For the negotiation process to

take place, demands, connected with the topic, should

be formulated by both sides (negotiators). If the de-

mands are satisfying for both sides, an agreement of

negotiation has been reached.

We can distinguish two kinds of human negotia-

tions: natural (face to face) and executed in the Inter-

net environment (e.g. supported by chat). Moreover,

software agent technologies can be used to automate

some steps of the negotiation process. Understand-

ing of the face to face negotiations (f2f) and com-

puter mediated negotiations (cmn) is very important

to make various human enterprises more efﬁcient and

effective (Phelps et al., 2004).

Let us consider a simple case of business negoti-

ations. The objects of negotiations are goods which

one partner (buyer) wants to buy and another part-

ner (seller) wants to sell. The demands are the suit-

able properties of the analysed goods such as prices of

goods, delivery terms, payment forms, etc. The ﬁnal

step of the negotiation is the contract for the goods de-

scribing conditions for completion of buying/selling

transactions. The outcome of the negotiations repre-

sents the accepted values of contract demands.

There are many different possibilities to formulate

demand sets as well as to organize negotiation strate-

gies. Apart from the above mentioned aspects, the

compromise outcomes depend on many other factors:

negotiators’ personalities, their motivations and expe-

riences, available communication channels and meth-

ods, alternative possibilities of other contracts, qual-

ity of the negotiated goods, criteria of negotiation de-

mands and so on (Bazerman et al., 2000).

The paper presents a web based system for

recording and analysing negotiation enterprises called

GAJA. The system provides tools for examining

many different aspects of negotiation processes. In

Section 2 we describe functionality of the proposed

system. In Section 3 we present the GAJA architec-

ture and Section 4 shows the main implementation

problems. Section 5 gives some experiments and out-

comes which demonstrate system usability.

2 IDEA OF GAJA

GAJA is a web based system that enables studying

negotiations in a natural environment (f2f) and in ar-

tiﬁcial environment (cmn). The main features of the

GAJA system are as follows:

• possibility to monitor several types of negotiations.

Currently it is possible to consider:

Piotrowski M. and Krawczyk-Brylka B. (2006).

THE WEB BASED SYSTEM FOR RECORDING AND ANALYSING DIFFERENT KINDS OF NEGOTIATIONS.

In Proceedings of WEBIST 2006 - Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies - Society, e-Business and

e-Government / e-Learning, pages 82-87

DOI: 10.5220/0001253500820087

 SciTePress

Figure 1: A fragment of the evaluation tree for sell/buy negotiations.

– sell/buy negotiations — a simple case of sell-

ing/buying a good by the participants;

– ranking negotiations — a group of people have

to collectively create a ranking of goods being

under consideration;

– enterprise negotiations oriented towards a design

of applications where small groups of students

are involved in designing of a simple web based

applications (using interactive incremental ap-

proach);

• possibility to deﬁne many versions (instances) of

experiments for each of the deﬁned types of nego-

tiations, for instance:

– different communication channels used during

negotiations;

– different roles and positions (power) of negotia-

tors;

– different negotiators tasks and demands;

• possibility to support activities of different types of

users, which are as follows:

– experts — they can deﬁne negotiation experi-

ments, observe their executions and evaluate ne-

gotiation processes and obtained outcomes;

– negotiations’ participants — they participate ac-

tively in experiments and give their own opin-

ions about the expected results, negotiations out-

comes and moods;

– administrators — they have access to all the

available data and they conﬁgure the system for

concrete requirements;

• possibility of quality analysis of negotiators’ be-

haviour and negotiation processes:

– evaluation of personal characteristics of all ne-

gotiators using psychological tests;

– reviews of available chat logs and recorded video

media by experts to improve evaluation process;

– discovery of knowledge hidden in the collected

data and available questionnaires using profes-

sional analytical application suites.

For each type of negotiations we would deﬁne the

suitable model of evaluation. We use groupwork

model: contribution – processes – outcome (CPO)

described in (Unsworth and West, 1999; Bazerman

et al., 2000) and generalized by (Krawczyk-Brylka

and Piotrowski, 2004). Figure 1 shows a fragment of

the model (quality tree) used to evaluate wide aspects

of negotiation outcomes. The tree contains several

different factors divided into two main categories: ob-

jective (calculated from monitored data) and subjec-

tive (calculated from questionnaires). Each of these

categories have subcategories such as:

• effectiveness — describes how negotiation out-

come is close to BATNA (Best Alternative to a Ne-

gotiated Agreement) alternatives for each partici-

pant. Here, effectiveness means the difference be-

tween accepted and expected demands of goods;

• ﬂuency — describes how ﬂuent the negotiation pro-

cess was like. It takes into account sequences of

negotiation phases, interruptions, etc.;

• friendliness — shows if negotiations were handled

in a friendly way (negotiators used kind words, they

were smiling, etc.);

• negotiation style — could be aggressive or cooper-

ative.

THE WEB BASED SYSTEM FOR RECORDING AND ANALYSING DIFFERENT KINDS OF NEGOTIATIONS

Figure 2: GAJA system architecture.

Some of the above factors can be evaluated in both

objective and subjective ways and some of them ei-

ther objectively or subjectively (see Figure 1). Some

quality metrics can be evaluated either by negotiators

or experts, or by both of them. Besides, we can regis-

ter the whole process of negotiations in the logs (chat,

video) and then analyse them many times for in depth

studies.

3 GAJA ARCHITECTURE AND

FUNCTIONALITY

In Figure 2 the GAJA system architecture is pre-

sented. It works in Internet infrastructure and its users

can connect to the system server using a web browser.

The available network environment is created by con-

troller module. The controller module has access to

repository where description of the system conﬁgura-

tion is stored. Also, all recorded data gathered from

experiments are registered in the data base. The con-

troller is responsible for creating user interface views

using appropriate functional modules. There are three

types of functional modules: experiment deﬁnition

modules, experiment execution modules and analysis

modules.

The experiment deﬁnition modules are available

only for experts and administrators. An expert selects

a type of negotiations and enters descriptions of an ex-

periment required by that type. Each negotiation ex-

periment consists of a task and contains background

information and precise instructions for each of the

negotiators. For example, an expert speciﬁes what the

subject of the negotiations is, what the criteria which

can be negotiated are (good price, guarantee period,

tutorial course price etc.) and deﬁnes speciﬁc roles for

each participant. Moreover, a role of negotiator fol-

lows from real quality goods and their minimum and

maximum price. Knowing the contracts, the system

estimates the effectiveness of negotiation process as a

difference between the expected and achieved negoti-

ation outcomes. Besides, an expert deﬁne the evalua-

tion trees, suitable questionnaires, negotiation period

(lengths) and scales of ranking of possible outcomes

(see Figure 1).

All the data referring to the experiment deﬁnition

are prepared in advance. When negotiators log into

the system, the system presents the tasks suitable for

them and then they make experiments. This process is

controlled by the experiment execution modules. The

main steps executed by negotiators can be as follows:

• understand negotiation instructions (situation back-

ground, aim of negotiations, their roles),

• start, perform and ﬁnish the negotiation process,

• fulﬁll questionnaires: personal information, forms

about negotiation outcomes and about their opin-

ions and their feelings.

The negotiation processes are recorded as chat logs

or video logs. The analysis module allows to examine

outcomes by experts. All the recorded data are used

in post mortem analysis of given set of negotiations.

Some factors are calculated automatically on the ba-

sis of stored information and they are available im-

mediately after experiments. Some extra information

needed for further analysis is entered by experts, fol-

lowing observations of available logs. Experts, simi-

lar as negotiators, fulﬁll the questionnaires that eval-

uate both the whole negotiation processes and perfor-

mance of each participant (subjective evaluations). To

WEBIST 2006 - SOCIETY, E-BUSINESS AND E-GOVERNMENT

Figure 3: Negotiation dance graphs for two criteria of negotiations (good price and its guarantee period).

facilitate the log evaluation GAJA, offers new possi-

bilities. During observation of the logs experts can

push different buttons of the keyboard to automati-

cally point out some events and to provide some es-

sential values connected with the events. The GAJA

system counts such events and calculates as objective

factors.

One of the possibilities of GAJA analysis is to

display so called “negotiation dance” which shows

changes in time of the negotiated demands. Figure 3

presents the graphs for the price and warranty period.

The analysis modules allow us to display all gath-

ered data as tabular reports (see Figure 4). The tabular

reports show some parameters such as participant ex-

pectations for negotiation outcome, weight for each of

the negotiated demands and ﬁnal values for negotia-

tion demands. The system enables exporting the table

to a CSV (comma separated values) ﬁle which can be

imported to any professional package e.g. STATIS-

TICA for more advanced statistical analysis.

4 IMPLEMENTATION

PROBLEMS

To achieve high system ﬂexibility we decided to use a

web technology. We decided to use PHP technology

to implement the main modules of GAJA. We also

used Java Applets or Java applications when it was

necessary or more convenient. The choice of PHP

was motivated by facts that it is widely known, pop-

ular and open source technology and it is easy adapt-

able for typical hardware and software.

We used modular, component oriented approach to

develop the system. We use the Model View Con-

troller pattern (Buschmann et al., 1996). Its main

part is the controller module responsible for control-

ling access to modules and choosing which functional

module has to be executed for suitable user actions

(Figure 2). In a special conﬁguration ﬁle it is set

which modules are activated and what types of users

can those modules use. Physically new modules are

just directories with code responsible for generating

appropriate views (Piotrowski and Krawczyk-Brylka,

2003; Krawczyk-Brylka and Piotrowski, 2004).

Each functional module is created with various

components (Gellersen et al., 1997). For main func-

tionality basic components were developed and added

to the GAJA system’s library. For the new function-

ality, the components were used to build new mod-

ules. Thanks to that approach, deﬁnition, execution

and analysis modules use common components and

objects, which simpliﬁes the introduction of changes

into the system.

In the development of execution modules we intro-

duced the step based approach. Using the library of

components we deﬁne steps of activities required in

the experiments. Each step is supported by adequate

components which display appropriate instructions to

a user and require user interactions to enter other in-

formation. Moreover, we can rearrange steps accord-

ing to experiment requirements or reuse them in new

types of experiments. In many cases this requires the

change of the step’s number and the controller module

utilizes components in a modiﬁed, new conﬁguration.

One of the big challenge in developing analysis

modules was to design a special user interface for

pointing out negotiation events that would be similar

for the video and chat logs. It is obvious that compari-

son of different media types is a difﬁcult problem so it

is not easy to create user interface which will provide

a similar way to analyse both video and chat logs.

F2f and cmn negotiations are always performed in

THE WEB BASED SYSTEM FOR RECORDING AND ANALYSING DIFFERENT KINDS OF NEGOTIATIONS

Figure 4: Screenshot of negotiation outcomes presented as tabular data (value of -9999 means lack of data).

a certain time frame. They take a period of time, start

in one point and end in another. As it was presented

the experts should point out some events (such as nice

gestures or friendly words) that occur in a certain mo-

ment in time. There arises problem how to synchro-

nize such events. Our proposition is the user interface

based on a logical timeline. For each negotiation ex-

periment we can deﬁne its own logical timeline. An

expert analysing the videos watches the records and

presses a key in the concrete moment of time when the

corresponding event is observed. Simultaneously the

event is marked on the timeline. Similarly an expert

analysing the chat logs marks a fragment of the suit-

able text which corresponds to a certain event. This

fact is registered on the logical timeline in the point

determined by the moment of sending the message by

the negotiator. In such way we obtain “negotiation

dances” (see Figure 3).

The approach allows us to analyse negotiation pro-

cesses in similar way regardless of what communica-

tion medium was used during the negotiations. More-

over, the system normalises the scale of times and var-

ious values of factors for all experiments.

5 EXPERIMENTS

To test GAJA system we arranged two main kinds of

experiments:

• sell/buy negotiations (f2f, cmn);

• enterprise negotiations oriented on a design of ap-

plications (development of blog, news site, wiki).

In the ﬁrst kind of experiments the negotiators fo-

cused on selling/buying medical equipments. They

have to negotiate prices, delivery terms, payment

forms, guarantee period and tutorial course costs.

In the second kind of experiments a small group of

students has a list of typical functions that web based

system can provide. They have to choose exactly six

of them considering their priority and a period of time

needed to develop them.

Up to now we have performed more than 150 ex-

periments of that two kinds. Most of them (about

120) where cmn negotiations. The rest of them were

f2f negotiations recorded by a camera. We performed

more than ten chat experiments in parallel sessions

using two network computer laboratories simultane-

ously. The participants of our experiments were

students from several departments of our university.

The experiments allow us to deeply test the system.

Presently the system seems to be a mature tool for

recording and analysing different kinds of enterprises

including various negotiation strategies.

Figure 5 presents an example analysis which was

made using STATISTICA application. In this case the

experiments conﬁrm the BATNA is not the most im-

portant factor in subjective assessment of negotiation

power. Other experiments show the choice of the

WEBIST 2006 - SOCIETY, E-BUSINESS AND E-GOVERNMENT

Figure 5: Distribution of negotiation outcomes for different negotiators power: a) equal for seller and buyer; b) buyer domi-

nance; c) seller dominance.

communication channel (chat or f2f) does not impact

on negotiation efﬁciency. Moreover, negotiation via

Internet leads to decrease of friendliness and ﬂuency

what in consequences changes the negotiators satis-

faction. The personal features like extroversion and

consciousness play much more important role in the

chat negotiations that in f2f meetings, where for the

latter negotiation experiences are essential factors.

6 SUMMARY

GAJA system covers many aspects of analysing hu-

man negotiations. It consists of multiple modules

which can be reconﬁgured according to experiment

requirements. Distributed GAJA environment enables

performing many experiments in parallel. This en-

ables making a large number of experiments in short

time. It is very important for multidimensional anal-

ysis of negotiation processes and gives new possibili-

ties in discovering new rules hidden in various human

activities.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported under KBN grant No

4T11C00525.

REFERENCES

Bazerman, M. H., Curhan, J. R., Moore, D. A., and Valley,

K. L. (2000). Negotiation. Annual Review of Psychol-

ogy, 51:279–314.

Buschmann, F., Meunier, R., and Rohnert, H. (1996).

Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture: A System of

Patterns. John Wiley & Sons, 1st edition.

Gellersen, H. W., Wicke, R., and Gaedke, M. (1997). We-

bComposition: An object-oriented support system for

the Web engineering lifecycle. Computer Networks

and ISDN Systems, 29(8–13):1429–1437.

Krawczyk-Brylka, B. and Piotrowski, M. (2004). Computer

based archivization of group activities processes (in

Polish). In National Conference on Information Tech-

nologies, pages 561–568, Gdansk, Poland.

Phelps, S., Tamma, V., Wooldridge, M., and Dickinson, I.

(2004). Toward open negotiation. IEEE Internet Com-

puting, 08(2):70–75.

Piotrowski, M. and Krawczyk-Brylka, B. (2003). Compo-

nent based design of internet system for evaluation

of communication-negotation enterprises (in Polish).

In National Conference on Information Technologies,

pages 553–561, Gdansk, Poland.

Unsworth, K. L. and West, M. A. (1999). Teams: the Chal-

lenges of Cooperative Work, chapter 14. Blackwell

Publishers.

THE WEB BASED SYSTEM FOR RECORDING AND ANALYSING DIFFERENT KINDS OF NEGOTIATIONS