Intelligent Information Systems - Organisational Communication

Negoisst

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

Negoisst is a research prototype developed to study electronic support in business negotiations. Instead of automating the negotiations, Negoisst strives to support the human negotiation partners in the best possible way. While the electronic communication media lack dedicated support, Negoisst as a negotiation support system offers this support e.g. in the form of decision support, communication support, document management and conflict management. New forms of support are constantly being developed and explored.

The research prototype Negoisst includes the latest support functions 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-attribute 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

The negotiating partners can set their goals before the negotiations. Based on these preferences, all offers and counteroffers exchanged during the negotiation are automatically scored with a utility value of 0 - 100%, indicating how well a given offer or counteroffer meets the objectives. Preferences and utility values ​​remain strictly confidential for the user.

Communication Support

The negotiations are supported on the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic level. (1) Syntactic support means that a specific negotiation protocol is implemented that defines the rules of the interaction. (2) Semantic support describes the linking of free message text and the formal negotiation agenda contained therein. (3) Pragmatic support refers to clearly specified message types (i.e. requests, offers, counter-offers, questions, clarification, acceptance, rejection) that make the intention of a message clear to the negotiating partner.

Document Management Support

Negoisst serves as a trust portal. It is hosted in Germany and based on EU GDPR legislation. The system allows negotiation partners to track and archive their negotiation processes for documentation and automatically generate contract templates from the negotiation data that facilitate the settlement phase.

Conflict Management Support

Negoisst supports mediation via a third party in negotiations with a high level of conflict. A mediator can be introduced to follow a clearly defined mediation process to resolve the conflict and assist the negotiating parties in finding a common solution.

Gamified Negotiation Training Support

Negoisst includes a guided tour that will introduce you to the most important functions. Just start the guided tour and gamified training negotiation levels with the Tactical Negotiation Trainer (TNT) - a software agent that acts as a negotiation partner.

Negoisst development

Negoisst is implemented using the latest frameworks and agile project management. The system is based on the Spring Boot Framework, which additionally uses Bootstrap and Thymeleaf to ensure excellent user experience. Our software development follows the agile SCRUM approach with GitLab and Sonarqube to implement DevOps and continuous integration.

Trying Negoisst

Negoisst offers an open platform for electronic negotiations. The system is used annually by over 350 researchers and practitioners worldwide for:

  • 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 Negoisst yourself. Simply create an account with your institutional email address. The system offers a guided tour that makes it easy to learn about key features and engage in 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: