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Combined negotiations in e-commerce: concepts, architecture, and implementation

The importance of negotiations in traditional and electronic markets has long been recognized by the academic and business communities. Also recognized is the fact that human negotiations tend to be complex, and time and resource consuming. Therefore, software support in conducting such processes is necessary. Nowadays, this necessity is becoming a challenge, as new negotiation protocols are introduced within electronic markets. One such protocol is Combined Negotiations. In a Combined Negotiation (CN), the user, be it a consumer or a company, is interested in a package of items (goods or services), and consequently engages in negotiations for all the items at the same time. The negotiations are independent of each other, whereas the items are typically interdependent. Using currently available e-negotiation support technology, the user would have to conduct each negotiation separately, and would have the burden of coordinating and reconciling them. In this doctoral research we introduce and define CNs; point to their challenges; identify the research issues they raise; and suggest, design, implement, and validate a software solution to conduct them. The solution takes the form of a Combined Negotiation Support System (CNSS) that a human can use to: (1) find the items and the providers of these items; (2) build a CN model that captures the sequencing of the individual negotiations and the dependencies between them; (3) provide negotiation strategies and coordination schemes; and (4) run the model, and possibly intervene in it when necessary. We designed an architecture for a CNSS we call CONSENSUS. The driving idea behind it is: (1) a workflow that captures the sequencing and the control flow of the