Stream organizers:

Liping Fang, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada

Keith W. Hipel, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Canada

D. Marc Kilgour, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

Stream description:

Strategic conflict arises whenever humans interact, individually or in groups. Recently-developed methodologies and techniques that can help analysts understand strategic conflicts and provide strategic support to negotiators have been of great benefit to decision makers. New theoretical issues are now being explored, and at the same time new software systems are making modeling easier and analytical results clearer. Both theoretical and practical approaches have been used to study strategic conflicts in diverse areas including environmental management, global warming, energy, the food crisis, economic disparities, international trade and aging infrastructure. The main objective of the Stream on Conflict Resolution is to provide a forum for discussion of recent advances in the development of formal conflict resolution techniques and their insightful application across a range of domains. Prospective authors are cordially invited to submit original research and applications.

Stream organizers:

Femke Bekius, Radboud University, Netherlands

L. Alberto Franco, Loughborough University, UK

Stream description:

The stream will include papers that examine practical and theoretical issues in relation to the design, use and evaluation of Group Decision and Negotiation Support (GDNS) approaches (manual and computer based) in both laboratory and field settings. Central to the stream is a concern with unpacking what people actually do when they engage with GDNS approaches, and how their behaviour affects, or is affected by, GDNS activity.

The stream will particularly welcome papers on the use of GDNS approaches to work on:

  • Decision making and negotiation with face-to-face and/or virtual teams
  • Strategy making in teams
  • Conflict resolution
  • Policy evaluation and analysis
  • Multi-organisation negotiation and collaboration

In addition, we are interested in hearing about the new theoretical and practical developments of GDNS approaches including:

  • Problem structuring methods
  • Facilitated modelling approaches such as Group Model Building, Decision Conferencing
  • Simulation approaches used in a facilitative mode
  • Games and gaming approaches

Finally, we will also welcome papers that examine the development of GDNS competences and skills.

Stream organizer:

Danielle Morais, Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil

Tomasz Wachowicz, Katowice School of Economics, Poland

Stream description:

A variety of methods, techniques and normative models, mainly derived from multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) and game theory, may be used to support groups of negotiators and decision makers (DM) in defining their goals, eliciting preferences, and building the negotiation offers’ scoring systems. The latter is fundamental for providing the groups with reliable decision support throughout the entire negotiation or group decision making process. However, many factors, such as cognitive issues, formal knowledge, and DM skills, may influence the actual use of scoring systems. Therefore, there is a constant need for redesigning the existing methods and designing new ones that allow for accurate preference modeling and elicitation for group decision and negotiation (GDN) process in a particular decision making context, given the DMs’ limitations regarding information processing and all formal and behavioral issues involved.

The main goal of this stream is to create a forum for scientists, researchers, and practitioners working on the topic of preference modeling for GDN that will allow them to exchange their experience and knowledge and discuss the recent developments and results of their research. Thus we invite contributors to submit to this stream the papers and sessions. Although not limited to, the stream includes the following topics:

  • Preference modeling in GDN problems
  • Methodological issues of preference analysis
  • Preference issues for choosing voting procedures
  • Preference modeling for mediation and arbitration
  • Preference learning
  • Behavioral studies on preference for GDN
  • Neuroscience experiments on preference for GDN
  • Experimental studies on preference for group decision and negotiation
  • Experimental studies on decision makers’ cognitive capabilities and needs for formal support in group decision and negotiation
  • Interfaces between GDN and MCDM
  • Use of MCDM methods for preference modeling in group decision and negotiation
  • Preferences in group decisions for MCDM
  • Group decision support based on partial information on preferences
  • Handling the imprecise and vague preference information
  • Preference aggregation of decision makers versus knowledge aggregation of experts
  • Group decision support based on partial information on experts’ knowledge

Stream organizers:

Mareike Schoop, University of Hohenheim, Germany

Rudolf Vetschera, University of Vienna, Austria

Muhammed-Fatih Kaya, University of Hohenheim, Germany

Stream description:

Business and personal interactions increasingly take place online and they contribute to building new relationships and associations. People involved in these interactions may have to engage in e-negotiations with using such common systems as email and skype, support tools and aids that are often embedded in business systems, as well as dedicated electronic negotiation support systems (NSSs). Researchers, developers and practitioners who design and develop NSSs, study their use in the laboratories and in the field, or incorporate NSS components into negotiation, mediation and facilitation are invited to participate in the NS3 stream. We also encourage research addressing digital transformation in relation to negotiation, i.e. how negotiation support systems transform organisations, processes, and practices.

We solicit papers looking at theory or practice, or both. In particular, we seek papers that help bridging the gap between the vast amount of work on face-to-face negotiations and online negotiations as well as decision and negotiation aids embedded in negotiation processes. We also seek papers that focus on the design and use of tools for decision support, communication support, document management, or conflict management for the negotiators and mediators in electronic negotiation processes. Furthermore, we encourage papers investigating processes of (digital) transformation in organisations affecting negotiation technology, negotiation media, and negotiation costs.

One goal of the NS3 stream is to bring together automated approaches (such as multi-agent systems) and support approaches (such as NSSs enabling negotiations between human negotiators). The stream has the following objectives:

  • To show the latest research in negotiation support systems and their use in e-negotiation processes.
  • To discuss a holistic approach to support human negotiators in complex processes.
  • To discuss the design and implementation issues of software agents for and in GDN.
  • To explore the role of agents in homogenous and heterogeneous environments.
  • To explore strategic reasoning and behaviours in argumentation-based negotiations.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Digital transformation of business negotiations
  • Bilateral, multi-bilateral and multi-lateral e-negotiations
  • Artificial Intelligence in e-negotiations
  • Machine learning as a research method in negotiation research
  • Cross-cultural online negotiations
  • Electronic mediation and facilitation
  • Emerging applications for e-negotiations (e.g., crowdsourcing, social networks)

Stream organizers:

Zhen Zhang, Dalian University of Technology, China.

Yucheng Dong, Sichuan University, China.

Francisco Chiclana, De Montfort University, UK.

Enrique Herrera-Viedma, University of Granada, Granada, Spain.

Stream description:

Group decision making is a process in which at least two experts work together to achieve a solution for a predefined decision problem. The decision environments are now becoming more and more complex with the rapid development of ICT and new decision paradigms, such as web 2.0, social network and e-democracy. As a result, intelligent group decision making that uses techniques of machine learning and artificial intelligence has attracted attentions from academic, researchers and practitioners in different fields.  In addition, to obtain a satisfactory solution for a group decision making problem, a consensus process is usually needed in which decision makers discuss, negotiate, and modify their opinions to obtain a satisfied consensus level. The aim of this stream is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners working jointly to discuss the state of the art of intelligent group decision making and consensus process, as well as their applications in real-world decision-making problems.

Stream organizers:

Masahide Horita, University of Tokyo, Japan

Hiroyuki Sakakibara, Yamaguchi University, Japan

Stream description:

Large-scale international projects in those sectors such as transportation, energy and telecommunication typically involve complex systems of group decision-making and stakeholders’ negotiations. This special stream is aimed at providing an arena where the various research topics explored in the GDN community meet the experience and tacit knowledge held by practitioners and researchers in project management. Organized in collaboration with the Construction Management Committee of the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, papers are invited from various fields and disciplines that deal with international project management from the theoretical, empirical or practical perspectives.

Stream organizers:

Yong Zheng, Illinois Institute of Technology, USA

David (Xuejun) Wang, Morningstar, Inc., USA

Stream description:

With the development of information technologies, human beings are increasingly flooded or overloaded with information resulting into problems like low user experience or inability to make decisions. Recommender systems (RecSys) have proven to be helpful in alleviating this information overload problem, providing personalized services and assisting users’ decision making. The basic idea behind RecSys is to infer users’ tastes from their past behaviors (such as user ratings, purchases, reviews, click-throughs, etc) and make personal propositions based on these user models. RecSys have been widely applied in a number of areas, including eCommerce (e.g., Amazon, eBay), movies (e.g., Netflix, Moviepilot), music (e.g., Pandora, Spotify), news (e.g., Yahoo news), tags (e.g., Flickr), social media (e.g., Twitter), online education (e.g., Coursera), and so forth.

The development of RecSys lies in multidisciplinary research, including algorithmic development, decision-making theories, human-computer interactions, psychologies, and so forth. Particularly, some special RecSys were strongly correlated with the decision making and negotiation knowledge and skills. For example, group RecSys try to recommend items to a group of users (e.g., in the scenario of group dinning), where the process of group decision making is involved. Multi-criteria RecSys can take advantage of user preferences on multiple criteria of the items to build better recommendations, where multi-criteria and multi-objective decision making can accelerate the development of these recommendation models.

This special session aims to enable recommender systems embrace the community of decision making. Particularly, we encourage submissions in group recommender systems, multi-criteria recommender systems, and multi-objective recommender systems, and discuss how existing and novel decision making theories/knowledge/skills can be utilized to serve better recommendations.

Topics of Interest includes but not limited to:

Recommender Systems: Algorithms and Development

  • Group Recommender Systems
  • Multi-Criteria Recommender Systems
  • Multi-Objective Recommender Systems

Decision Making for Recommender Systems

  • Group Decision Making
  • Multi-Criteria Decision Making
  • Multi-Objective Decision Making
  • Applied Game Theory
  • Decision Making and Negotiation Analysis
  • Human factor-based Decision Making, e.g., personality, trust, emotional analysis

Applications (must be correlated with RecSys and Decision Making)

  • Business or financial analysis
  • Education
  • Social computing
  • E-Commerce

Stream organizers:

Pascale Zaraté, Toulouse Capitole University, France

Stream description:

Making a decision for a group engaged in a common task is a difficult challenge. There are several kinds of group decision making processes. This stream addresses Collaborative Decision Making processes. By Collaborative Decision Making processes, we intend that involved participants must pool their efforts in order to define and work on the achievement of a common goal. They have to integrate multiple points of view which reveal to be difficult. They have to work together, although not necessarily in the same place or at the same time. Decisional processes are then complex and involve a non-closed set of actors. The difficult point for decision-makers is to make a balance between their own preferences and the building of common preferences within the group. One direct application in the daily life of such Collaborative Decision-Making processes can be implemented through the e_democraty which is defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens are presumed to be eligible to participate equally in the proposal, development, and creation of laws.

The purpose of this stream is to allow researchers to present methodologies, mathematical models, and software supporting Collaborative Decision-Making processes. Submitted papers/abstracts can describe both theoretical and empirical studies like for example survey, field study, case study, experimentation…

 

Stream organizers:

Haiyan Xu, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China

Shawei He, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, China

Shinan Zhao, Jiangsu University of Science and Technology, China

Stream description:

Risk evaluation over business, programs, and conflicts are commonly observed and extensively analyzed in the real world. Risks in complex systems have been paid increasing attentions by researchers. Formal methodologies have been developed to help understand risks in negotiation and discover courses of action to reach desired agreements. The main purpose of this stream is to provide a forum to present novel risk evaluation models and their applications to negotiation. The topics of interest includes but are not limited to:

  • Risk evaluation models and tools
  • Conflict intervention
  • Negotiation models and tools
  • Negotiation strategies with third-party intervention
  • Attitude and behavior of intervention

Stream organizers:

Fuad Aleskerov, HSE University, Moscow, Russia

Alexey Myachin, HSE University, Moscow, Russia

Stream description:

We consider a wide range of works on the network and decision analysis of various political connections and the decisions stemmed from these connections. The aim of this session is to bring together researchers, academics, practitioners, and students who are working on theoretical, computational, and applied aspects that facilitate decision-making process.

The session includes the papers that contain recent results obtained by research teams from academia and industry concerning but not limited to the following topics:

  • Analysis of real-world decision processes
  • Theoretical works on Group Decisions
  • Manipulation in Voting
  • Models of complex networks
  • Big Data analysis on social networks
  • Social influence and information diffusion models
  • Link prediction
  • Recommendation systems and networks
  • Influence of Covid-19 to decision processes and the development of the world