Supporting negotiation with scenario management

The paper presents a two level framework to support inter organizational negotiation. At the first level, we view a group problem as a resource allocation problem among involved parties, and negotiation as the members´ act to protect or better yet to gain additional resources for themselves. To support negotiation, we propose an action resource model to represent negotiation problems, and an argumentation language to support negotiation processes. At the second level, we propose a formal language to help each party explore scenarios. The paper is an extension of a previous work (M. Binbasioglu et al., 1995; T. Bui et al., 1995) that focuses on defining a formal language for argumentation. In particular, it describes a language for managing scenarios. The proposed scenario management is illustrated by an actual negotiation-the softwood lumber negotiation between Canada and the United States