A Semi-automated Negotiation Process to Improve the Usability for Online Marketplaces

Online marketplaces leverage information technology to bring together buyers and sellers, with greater effectiveness at massive scales; however, conflicts related to product prices are usually the bottlenecks of trading efficiency within these online marketplaces. An embedded negotiation support function allows buyers and sellers to negotiate product prices via system interfaces; hence it would lead to greater trading efficiency. However, traditional negotiation process demands lengthy user engagement time with complicated procedures. A semi-automated negotiation process is proposed to reduce the human engagement time with simple procedures. Experimental results show that, the new approach will not damage the original negotiation success rate. In the future, it is important to implement an actual semi-automated negotiation support system for further evaluations.