Using Fuzzy Logic To Identify Significant Factors Of Negotiation Performance

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Date
2013-06
Authors
Nachef, Tameur
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Publisher
Universiti Sains Malaysia
Abstract
Many social and business interactions involve negotiation, in which participants may cooperate to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome that serves both parties, or compete to get the best deal for a party over the other. Within this context, negotiation can be defined as the process whereby two or more parties attempt to settle what each shall give and take, or perform and receive, in a transaction between them. Negotiation is considered as one of the most important activities that managers do on a daily basis in developing business in different markets. It is estimated to consume about fifty percent of their working time. Even with such lengthy consumption of time and effort, negotiation failure rate is reported to be high, which often leads negotiators to fail to achieve a mutual settlement. Studies on negotiation and business deal closure are focused on either decision making style or the approaches and tactics used by negotiators. History has revealed that the real world consists of multidimensional factors with mass influences, where cause and effect are imprecise, equilibrium momentary, and with repeated patterns of irregular performance. Viewed from this perspective, a new approach and different mindset is required to look into developing multidimensional model and generating strategies that lead to better understanding in interpreting business interaction and deal closure without losing its value in different situation or with diverse parties. This study presents a methodology with a multidimensional model, and a fuzzy rule-based decision support system that assists Malaysian’s business decision makers to understand and identify factors affecting the business deal closure with their Middle East counterparts in a non-static fast changing world. “IF-THEN” fuzzy rules using linguistic variables that are considered to impact the outcome of the negotiation are generated. A genetic algorithm-based methodology is developed to obtain the optimal set of fuzzy rules. In addition, a fuzzy inference system is created to assess the negotiation outcomes’ performance. The findings of this study revealed that negotiation should not be viewed as very personal skills. It validated the strong impact of organizational dimension as well as the tangible and intangible aspects of the deal itself. Furthermore, this research is in support with the perspective that negotiation could not be either a decision-making or a problem solving process; it is more toward a mixed mode discipline.
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Using Fuzzy Logic To Identify Significant Factors , Of Negotiation Performance
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