Negotiation Research - Transformation, Technology, Media, and Costs

Negoisst

 

Business negotiations are increasingly often conducted via electronic means (e.g. email, audio/video chat) to enable distributed work in globally dispersed value chains, benefit from automated documentation, or simply save time and costs.

Negoisst is a research prototype developed to investigate electronic support in business negotiations. Instead of automating negotiation, Negoisst aims to support the human negotiators in the best possible way. Whilst electronic communication media lack dedicated support, Negoisst, as a negotiation support system, provides such support e.g. in the form of decision support, communication support, document management, and conflict management. New forms of support are continuously developed and investigated.

The research prototype Negoisst includes the latest support features based on negotiation research. It is continuously tested and evaluated in international negotiation simulations with students and practitioners.

Negoisst is developed within the research area Negotiation Research – Transformation, Technology, Media, and Costs.

Negotiation Support Features

Negoisst is a web-based responsive application. It can be used on desktop computers, tablets and mobile phones. Negoisst enables asynchronous, bilateral multi-issue negotiations. I.e. negotiation partners exchange text messages similar to emails including a formal negotiation agenda specifying the negotiation issues at the table. Negoisst provides several support features:

 

 

Decision Support

Negotiators can specify their goals before negotiating. Based on these preferences all offers and counteroffers exchanged during the negotiation are automatically evaluated with a utility value from 0 – 100% indicating how well a specific message conforms to the goals. Preferences and utilities remain strictly private to the user.

Communication Support

Negotiations are supported on the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic layer. (1) Syntactic support means that a specific negotiation protocol is implemented defining the rules of interaction. (2) Semantic support describes the interlinking of free message text and the formal negotiation agenda included. (3) Pragmatic support refers to clearly specified messages types (i.e. requests, offers, counteroffers, questions, clarification, accept, reject), which make the intention of a message clear to the negotiation partner.

Document Management Support

Negoisst serves as a trusted-third-party platform. It is hosted in Germany underlying EU-GDPR legislation. The system allows negotiators to trace and archive their negotiation processes for documentation and automatically generate contract templates from the negotiation data facilitating the settlement phase.

Conflict Management Support

Negoisst supports third-party mediation in negotiations having a high level of conflict. A mediator can be introduced pursuing a clearly defined mediation process to settle the conflict and support the negotiators in finding a mutual solution.


Negotiation Training Support

Negoisst includes a guided tour, which will introduce you to its main features. Just start the levels to engage into the onboarding tour and training negotiations with the Tactical-Negotiation-Trainer (TNT) - software agent acting as a negotiation partner.

Negoisst is implement using state-of-the art frameworks and agile project management. The system is based on the Spring Boot framework employing Bootstrap and Thymeleaf to provide great user experience. Our software development follows the agile SCRUM approach using GitLab and Sonarqube to implement DevOps and continuous integration.

Trying Negoisst

Negoisst provides an open platform for electronic negotiations. The system is used by over 350 researchers and practitioners per year worldwide in

  • business negotiation trainings,
  • applied negotiation teaching in higher education, and
  • negotiation experiments

If you are interested in using Negoisst or have any questions please contact us at: support@negoisst.de.

You can also try out Negoisst yourself. Just register an account using your institutional email address. The system features a guided tour, where you can easily learn about its main features and engage into training negotiations with our Tactical-Negotiation-Trainer.

Career

If you want to become part of the Negoisst team, please have a look at our open positions.

 

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of our partners: