Representation and Assisted Negotiation of Textual Agreements

Abstract

Research into negotiation systems has primarily focused on those for e-commerce and electronic markets, where quantitative values such as prices are key to what is being negotiated. However, there is a lack of research into tool support for complex real-life negotiations of documents that contain large amounts of textual (qualitative) clauses. Examples of such text-based agreements include international trade and climate-change treaties, as well as labor-management collective agreements. Our goal is to improve the state of the art in textual negotiation technology, so it can be applied to such agreements and their negotiations. In particular, we want to be able to develop technology that can facilitate the delicate give-and-take involving proposed changes, positions, rationale exchange, partial resolutions to disagreements, tracking of notes taken by the negotiators, as well as the ability to search and compare all of the above to facilitate negotiations. We posit that there would be significant societal benefit from the hyper-local to the international level if better technology was available. We performed literature reviews of existing negotiation systems and systems for representing legal documents to study what has been done in this domain. We also performed a grounded theory study based on interviews with people that have participated in real-life negotiations. An end-user's survey of negotiation systems was also conducted and analyzed. We used the results from the literature review, grounded theory and survey analysis, as the basis for a subsequent phase of design-science research in which we developed use cases, requirements and a comprehensive metamodel for qualitative negotiation tools, as well as a prototype negotiation tool.