Towards Effective Negotiation Support in Electronic Marketplaces

Electronic marketplaces are an upcoming model for business-to-business electronic commerce. In electronic marketplaces, companies can offer their services and products. Other companies can search for products in the marketplace to find new business partners. Once contact between two business partners has been established, a negotiation starts in order to reach a formal agreement on their business relation. During the negotiation, documents and messages are exchanged. Systems for electronic markets support auctions and similar negotiation models rather than peer-to-peer negotiations. However, peer-to-peer negotiations are common in most business domains. In this paper, we propose a conceptual model to support electronic negotiations by extending the model of document management systems with communication models. The idea is based on the observation that the exchange of messages is closely related to the evolution of documents.