A Negotiation Mechanism for Coordinating B2B E-commerce Decisions

The rapid growth of the Internet user and Web technology will move the whole economy to be information-based society because of its great efficiency. Among a wide variety of the Internet applications, the Electronic Commerce (ecommerce) has been regarded as one of the most powerful drive-force for changing the current economic landscape. The Web technology is the fundamental one underlying the current proliferation of e-commerce. It can help the information exchange between companies, between a company and its customers, and among different departments of a business efficiently and cost effectively, regardless of geographical limitations. However, just simple information communication by the Web technology cannot satisfy the complicated needs of a firm to be supported in its decisionmaking process and in its conflict resolution process. Most company need highly intelligent decision support because there exist a lot of conflicts between decision making units such as production, marketing, personnel, finance, etc. Such a kind of intelligent decision support can be called“coordination”. If coordination is applied to e-commerce, then efficiency will jump up. Previous studies on ecommerce and Negotiation Support System (NSS) are reviewed. This research combined negotiation between two parties and multi-staged negotiation. This paper proposed hybrid negotiation mechanism named MINE (MIcro Negotiation Engine) and MANE (MAcro Negotiation Engine). An experiment was done by using hypothetical illustrative cases of flower trade in e-commerce.