Software agents' collaboration with negotiators: Results from experiments

Prof. Dr. Gregory E. Kersten
Concordia University
Montreal, Canada

Friday, 25th November 2005
0930 - 1100

Room 203 (2nd floor)
AGSE Building
John Street, Hawthorn

Abstract:

In e-negotiations software is used to allow people from remote locations to engage in (a)synchronous negotiations. Automated negotiations are initiated and undertaken solely by the software agents. They can be seen as an extreme type of e-negotiations with the other extreme being processes in which software is notused. Between these two extremes are negotiations in which there is a division of work between people and software. In this talk several types of work division based on the negotiation process model are discussed. Active support provided by software agents is illustrated with several recent experiments in which we studied the impact of negotiation software agents on the negotiation effectiveness and efficiency.

Biosketch:

Gregory Kersten is Professor of decision and information systems at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University and an adjunct research professor at the Carleton University Sprott School of Business. In 2002-2005 he was Paul Desmarais/Power Corporation professor at the School of Management, University of Ottawa.  Prof. Kersten received M.Sc. in Econometrics and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from the Warsaw School of Economics, Poland. His research and teaching interests include individual and group decision-making, negotiation analysis, knowledge-based systems and knowledge management, decision and negotiation support, web-based system development and electronic commerce.