Title: Business Negotiations: Agents, Models, Data

Report Abstract:
Beginning with Edgeworth in 1881, economists have been interested in the distribution of resources between firms. A modification of Edgeworth’s suggestion is a well-known Edgeworth box, which illustrates a contract curve on which every point is an efficient solution to the negotiation problem.
Zeuthen (1930) proposed a negotiation strategy based on monotonic concessions that yield an agreement providing that, for every negotiator, the utility of this agreement is greater than the utility of disagreement. Harsanyi (1962) studied negotiations in the context of game theory and showed that the Zeuthen’s agreement is equivalent to the well-known Nash bargaining solution (1950). Baarslag, et al. (2016) and Rosenfeld and Kraus (2019) wrote comprehensive reviews of hybrid and automated negotiations. The general purpose is that these systems reach an agreement, if possible, Pareto optimal. The corollary is that the agents seek a single solution and exchange information about the same set of issues. Obviously, many business negotiations are concerned with finding a beneficial contract requiring the participants to agree on the contract terms. While these negotiations are commonplace they are easier to model and represent than negotiations in which the participants are more interested in learning about each other than about the contract details (Kersten, 2019).

Speaker: Gregory E. Kersten

Date/Time: 14:00 – 16:00PM, June 27 2019

Location: Room 706, College of Economics and Management Building, Jiangjun Rd. Campus

Speaker Biography:
Dr. Kersten (Gregory E. Kersten, Constance), senior professor at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, and an adjunct professor at the School of Mechanical Engineering and Management at Barry University of Technology, Italy. Chairman of the INFORMS Group Decision and Negotiation Chapter, Editor-in-Chief of Group Decision and Negotiation, SSCI Q1 Journal. He has served as an visiting professor at the Bari Institute of Technology, the US Naval Postgraduate School, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, the National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan, and the Austrian Institute for International Applied Systems Analysis. Has long been engaged in single and group decision making, negotiation analysis, negotiation support, exchange mechanism, auction, network-based system development, behavioral economics and other fields of research. An internationally renowned scholar in the group decision making and negotiation system. The research project has been supported by the Canadian Natural Science and Engineering Fund, the Canadian Society of Social and Human Sciences, the German Humboldt Fund, the Australian Research Fund, the Canadian Bell Fund, and the Italian CINECA Fund. He has published 9 monographs/dissertations and published more than 80 papers in authoritative SCI/SSCI academic journals such as Management Science, Decision Support Systems, European Journal of Operational Research (Google Scholar cited 5456 times, h index 40).