ABSTRACT
Negotiations are widely used by entities such as individuals, teams, firms, countries, and others to conduct a variety of transactions. Fundamentally, negotiation is a market mechanism to allocate the gains from a trade, which may be to share or divide limited resources, create something new that neither party can create on its own, or resolve a dispute and conflict between the transacting parties. Bargaining, auctions, and bartering or exchanges can all be considered different forms of negotiation. New information technologies (ITs) spawned by the Internet have enabled negotiations to occur between entities that may be geographically dispersed and even virtual “strangers.” The effects of IT on negotiations include the birth of online auctions (e.g., https://ebay.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">ebay.com), “spot” markets for selling consulting services (e.g., https://eLance.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">eLance.com), and companies that enable the monitoring of remote workers (e.g., https://oDesk.com" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">oDesk.com), among numerous other examples too abundant to list.
