Individual Assignment no. 5 and News Posting combined.

Question:

How did your group make the decisions? What problems did you encounter in the process? Did your group make decisions in a different way than the whole class did? Why? What kind of information system do you need to design to support such a process of negotiation? Provide a simple hardware/software configuration.

Answer:

As the goal of our group was to establish equal amount of points for which students and we did not have real competition among us (no real benefits and reasons to hide information from each other) we decided to cooperate in full. We chose a person, who volunteered to calculate the optimal points distribution among team members and send him all our personal scores by e-mail. As result during our class meeting we had a table with different alternatives available and amount of scores each of alternative gives to the members. One of the problems was that one of our members had to get very low score in orders others could get high. Or all of the students had to get less or more equal low score, what we did not like too. In order to solve the problem we talked to the professor and realized that we were free to change our conditions and share points like we want. From my point of view it does not make sense as in negotiations you always have some conditions fixed and you have operate instead of them with the better possible option for you. In you case everything was flexible. So, finally we pick the option with the highest possible score and shared our points among each of the members equally to get the highest possible score for everybody. I believe we are the only team who made such a decision - to change completely all the frames of the assignment given - the rest of the teams were flexible only inside the limits of the individual scores given. The reason was - additional hint from the professor and our "boldness" in changing all the conditions without fear to lose possible points.

To make such a decision with the use of informative systems you have to have software or system combining: database available with all necessary data; Microsoft Excel or other program allowing you to create a table and sort the data given; e-mail software allowing you to communicate with other members or another method of communication (phone, VoiP, etc).

News Blog:

As an real example of such a system you can see The Mediator software (http://www.mcn.org/c/rsurratt/conflict.html).

The Mediator promises to find the best possible agreements between two people . The real value of this program lies in the realization that different people have their own idea about how important the issues are or how much the issues are worth. It is possible then to find envy-free agreements in which all parties feel as if they've gotten the best deal. This program will allow you to easily enter the areas of conflict, assign preferences for both parties, and automatically calculate the fair, equitable, and envy-free maximization of those preferences. There is demo version available on the web-site to try it.

Personally I am very skeptical in using negotiations software: as real negotiation is all about persuasion and communicating efficiently (voice recognition and visual presence allow to solve each negotiation 3 times faster), but in some easier events (e-bay bidding, etc.) it can be really efficient.