Part II Formation, 3 Agreement

This is a detailed treatment of the rules governing the formation of contract. All facets of that process are covered. Modern ;transactions are often formed by electronic negotiation. Accordingly, the postal rule needs to be supplemented by reference to e-mailed offers and acceptances. Other features of formation include: relief when negotiations abort, based on the principle of unjust enrichment; ‘multipartite contracts’, that is, agreements involving more than two parties; the revocation of offers before acceptance; the special nature of acceptance when the contract is unilateral, rather than both parties having obligations; the possibility of acceptance without words, that is, by conduct; the problem of silence on the part of the offeree; and competition between parties to win the so-called battle of the forms.

Negotiation communication revisited

Negotiators communicate with each other and decide on offers or requests. Whilst the decision side of negotiations has long been a focus of negotiation research, the communication side has not been extensively supported. The current paper revisits the need for a communication perspective in business negotiations and reviews current research on negotiation communication. Both strands of relevant work are then integrated to provide a concept of electronic negotiation communication and to discuss how this concept was implemented in the system Negoisst and thus operationalised.

Bargaining Chip

Negotiation is one of the basic forms of interpersonal communication, especially important in contemporary business. Although we assume that only humans can engage in negotiations, there are many negotiation support systems and software agents designed to assist human negotiators before and during the process. They were developed to overcome human cognitive biases and limited ability to handle information. They can support human negotiators, but also be used in place of humans to carry out negotiations on their own. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of different types of electronic negotiation, most recent advances in that area, some challenges in electronic negotiation, and interaction between humans and agents in negotiation.

An E-negotiation Agent for an E-tourism Platform

The article presents an electronic negotiation agent, integrated within a multiagent system for an electronic tourism platform. The e-negotiation process is based on a winner-winner approach, using a bargaining protocol. However, with the proliferation of services, the task of searching for relevant services becomes more and more difficult. Thus, the authors also propose a search agent to find tourism services corresponding to the client request and profile. The discovery process uses a quantitative similarity measure.