A Cognitive Map Approach to B2B Negotiation to Integrate Unstructured and Structured Negotiation Term

As the advent of the Internet, B2B negotiation process on the Internet has been given attention from both researchers and practitioners. However, literature still shows that only structured conditions have been explicitly considered, despite the fact that unstructured conditions should be rendered as well. In this sense, this paper proposes a new negotiation support mechanism to incorporate causal relationships between structured and unstructured conditions in the process of B2B negotiation. Fuzzy cognitive map was used as a main source of causal knowledge as well causal inference engine. A prototype named CAKES-NEGO was developed to perform experiments with an illustrative example. Results revealed the robustness of our proposed negotiation support mechanism.