Negotiation is a dialogue between two or more people or parties, intended to reach an understanding, resolve point of difference, or gain advantage

in outcome of dialogue, to produce an agreement upon courses of action, to bargain for individual or collective advantage, to craft outcomes to satisfy various interests of two people/parties involved in negotiation process. Negotiation is a process where each party involved in negotiating tries to gain an advantage for themselves by the end of the process. Negotiation is intended to aim at compromise. Negotiation occurs in business, non-profit organizations, government branches, legal proceedings, among nations and in personal situations such as marriage, divorce, parenting, and everyday life. The study of the subject is called negotiation theory. Professional negotiators are often specialized, such as union negotiators, leverage buyout negotiators, peace negotiators, hostage negotiators, or may work under other titles, such as diplomats, legislators or brokers.

5 Negotiating issues and concerns

The country case studies contain a concluding section, which discusses the negotiating issues and concerns. These reviews draw at times on the official submissions to the WTO Special Session of the Committee on Agriculture by the countries themselves, and in other instances on a more general discussion of the right and obligations of developing countries vis--vis the developed countries under the AoA. While, in this overview chapter, it is neither possible nor appropriate to summarize the detail of the individual country positions, some general points can be made in conclusion. Gaining improved market access, particularly in the developed countries which, historically, have had the highest levels of trade-distorting support to domestic agricultural production, and removing the unfair competition caused by export subsidies, remain key objectives in the current negotiating round. In most developing countries, the import substitution strategies of the past have been replaced by development policies, which emphasize the gains from integration into the global economy. However, these gains will not be realized if trade barriers continue to inhibit and restrict the growth of sectors where developing countries have a comparative advantage. The difficulties are clearly seen in the Egyptian case study. With improved market access, Egypt would better adopt a strategy that is based on allocating increasing amount of resources to highvalue exportable horticultural products in which Egypt has a comparative advantage. However, limited market access improvements will push Egypt to adopt an import-substitution strategy that focuses on food production, which implies a less efficient use of agricultural resources. Protectionism in the EU (as Egypts major market) is not an incentive to modify its position on food self-sufficiency as the means to food security. Under the market access and competition headings, the particular problems raised in the case studies include: tariff peaks on the export products of interest to developing countries; tariff

escalation which, although reduced in the UR, remains a deterrent to increasing value-added food processing activity in developing countries; increasing use of SPS measures and long delays in recognizing the equivalence of SPS measures put in place in developing countries; the problem of trade preferences; the need for larger TRQ volumes and more transparent administration of access to them; and the need to dismantle export subsidies. Most of the case studies argue the case for an appropriate safeguard mechanism against low import prices and import surges, to allow for further trade liberalization while guarding against incurring unduly high social costs. Such a mechanism is also justified as a means to protect against the effect of high levels of subsidies and protection to agriculture in developed countries, which depress and destabilize world prices and create unfair competition on both international and domestic markets. There is a widespread perception that the general GATT safeguards are too difficult and cumbersome to be used because injury must be shown. A modified version of the Special Safeguard provision, to be available only to developing countries, is seen as a more effective alternative. The other concern raised particularly by food-importing countries is the fear of higher world prices and price volatility leading to upward price risk for importing countries. The Marrakesh Decision is widely seen as ineffective, and some strengthening of its provisions will be essential to gain the support of low-income food-importing countries in the current negotiations. Many of the case studies pointed to the need to ensure that AoA rules did not prevent developing countries from protecting and supporting domestic food production. This concern partly arises from the perception that a high level of food self-sufficiency, particularly in staple foods, was necessary for national food security. It also arises from the fact that the bulk of poverty is found in rural areas, and there is thus the need to foster growth and employment opportunities in rural areas and agriculture as part of a food security strategy. Because small producers are often the most vulnerable in the process of trade liberalization, some kind of targeted support mechanism to increase small farm productivity and to stimulate rural economic diversification may also be required to prevent the marginalization of low-income producers. A third argument is one of equity: that the AoA rewarded developed countries for past heavy subsidization by permitting them to continue this practice, but now withholds from developing countries the same rights, simply because they were too poor to finance such subsidies in the past. The evidence from the case studies suggests that WTO disciplines have not proved constraining to the domestic support policies that developing countries want to implement. Budgetary constraints and previous commitments under SAPs appear to be much more important in limiting these interventions. However, many of the case studies indicate that developing countries are uneasy about the implications of the current disciplines for future domestic support options. Many developing countries want greater flexibility than the current provisions in them AoA allow. Some historical perspective on trends in support to farmers may be helpful in examining this concern. As countries develop, higher income levels are associated with greater levels of transfers to the domestic farming sector. There are both economic and political reasons why this has been the case historically. Economic growth is associated with a shift in employment

opportunities from the farm to the non-farm sectors, and from rural to urban areas. This shift is associated with a growing disparity between average non-farm and farm incomes and, ultimately, with a decline in the absolute size of the farm labour force. Faced with declining relative incomes, farmers have an incentive to organize and to lobby politically for income transfers. At the same time, economic growth means that there is greater scope for the non-farm sector to bear the cost of growing transfers to farmers. Economic growth also means a change towards more meatbased diets with greater indirect consumption of cereals, often leading in the case of netfood-importing countries to a deterioration in the agricultural trade balance. Concerns that declining food self-sufficiency ratios imply diminished food security combine with equity concerns to raise the willingness of the nonfarm population to contribute to farm transfers. As the farming sector declines further in size, farmers become more effective in their lobbying efforts, while the cost of transfers to the increasingly numerous non-farm population declines in per capita terms. The result is escalating levels of farm support as a countrys per capita income grows. It is likely that the same economic and political forces will be at work, particularly in the middle-income developing countries, as their per capita income levels rise. Evidence from the case studies shows that financial constraints in many developing countries, and especially low-income developing countries, mean that these countries will be unlikely to be able to make use of additional flexibility for domestic support outlays. The more likely users of additional flexibility are middle-income developing countries where industrialization has taken hold and where the absolute numbers engaged in agriculture are falling. Given these likely pressures for increased farm transfers in the future, particularly among middleincome developing countries, the question for developing countries is whether to accommodate these pressures by seeking greater flexibility to provide productionrelated farm transfers. There are important lessons to be learned from the developed country experience where the scope for protection tends to be captured by producer groups and is not necessarily in the overall national interest. An alternative strategy, more favoured by low-income developing countries, is to retain or increase the flexibility to take border measures to protect domestic food production. Higher tariffs to protect domestic food producers do not incur government expenditure, indeed they may contribute to government revenues. There is a permanent tension between raising prices to benefit rural food producers and lowering food prices to enhance the food security of food consumers. The benefits of price support tend to go predominantly to the larger, commercial producers who produce the bulk of the marketed food supply. Many of the rural poor are agricultural workers and net purchasers of food. Indonesia provides a dramatic example where the incidence of poverty, having fallen steadily over the two decades 1976-1996, rose sharply as a result of the Asian crisis only to drop back to its pre-crisis level by 2000. Declining food prices, mainly driven by lower rice prices owing to trade reform, accounted for a large proportion of that improvement. In some cases, the elimination of over-valued exchange rates would increase incentives for domestic food production (as in Egypt recently) without introducing the distortions associated with a tariff policy, but special measures to help poor consumers following devaluation may also be taken. Future tariff policy also needs to take into account regional integration commitments undertaken by individual countries. A number of the case studies raise specific issues for clarification in the agricultural negotiations other than those mentioned above. Examples of such issues include the status of irrigation

subsidies, the methodology used to calculate the market price support element of the AMS and the position of the LDCs. Some countries would like AoA rules clarified to permit positive PS AMS levels, or positive NPS AMS levels, to be offset by negative PS AMS levels. Such a change would be relevant only to countries which have a bound AMS commitment. For countries whose AMS levels in future must be limited to exempt categories - and these are the great majority of developing countries - the offset possibility would not be meaningful because de minimis requirements cap the permitted AMS level to 10 percent of the VoP of each individual commodity, regardless of how high or low AMS levels are for other commodities. As the negotiations proceed, and the particular negotiating trade-offs become clearer, developing countries will need to undertake specific and detailed analyses of how they might be affected by individual issues under negotiation. Some countries have a need for technical and financial assistance to improve the capacity for policy analysis. A number of the case studies highlighted the inadequacy of the policy-making machinery in many countries to address AoA issues and the need for improved coordination, including the involvement of civil society organizations in the formulation of national negotiating positions. Also, many developing countries are negotiating regional integration arrangements simultaneously with multilateral trade liberalization. The need for developing countries to assess and update their AMS levels, not just to comply with the WTO process but as part of the domestic policy analysis process, was stressed in some studies. While some countries had benefited from technical assistance under the Joint Integrated Technical Assistance Programme and the Integrated Framework for Trade Related Technical Assistance to LDCs, there is a continued need for technical and financial assistance to improve the capacity for policy analysis, particularly in the LDCs.
6.1 Negotiable issues and activity Which issues are negotiable depends on the activity. For example, it is usually not the case that the name of a DP is a negotiable issue; this is why it would perhaps seem counterintuitive to view an introduction (\Hi, my name is NN") as a proposal. However, it cannot be ruled out that there is some activity where even this may become a matter of negotiation. Also, it is usually possible in principle to make any issue into a negotiable issue, e.g. by raising doubts about a previous answer. However, for our current purposes we may make a distinction between negotiable and nonnegotiable issues in an activity. The advantage of this is that the more complex processing and domain-specic knowledge required for negotiable issues are only required for issues which the system needs to be able to negotiate. The drawback, of course, is that the system becomes less exible; however, there is always the possibility of dening all issues as negotiative if one so desires. 6.2 Alternatives as answers to issues on IUN

Given that we analyze Issues Under Negotiation as questions, it is a natural move to analyze the alternative solutions to this issue as potential answers. On this view, a proposal has the eect of adding an alternative answer to the set of alternative answers to an issue on IUN. An answer to the question on IUN is equivalent to accepting one of the potential answers as the actual answer. That is, a question on IUN is resolved when an alternative answer is accepted.
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Here we see how our concept of acceptance diers from Sidner. On our view a proposal can be accepted in two dierent ways: as a proposal, or as the answer to an issue on IUN. Accepting a proposal move as adding an alternative corresponds to meta-level acceptance. However, accepting an alternative as the answer to an issue on IUN is dierent from accepting an utterance. Given the optimistic approach to acceptance, all proposals will be assumed to be accepted as proposals; however, it takes an answer-move to get the proposed alternative accepted as the solution to a problem.

7 Adding IUN to the GoDiS information state

The ideas described in this paper are currently being implemented in GoDiS (Bohlin et al., 1999), an experimental dialogue system initially adapted for the travel agency domain but later adapted for several other domains. GoDiS is implemented using the TrindiKit(Larsson and Traum, 2000; Larsson et al., 2000), a toolkit for experimenting with information states and dialogue move engines and for building dialogue systems. The notion of information state used by GoDiS is basically a version of the dialogue game board which has been proposed by (Ginzburg, 1998). We represent information states of a dialogue participant as a record of the type shown in Figure 3. The main division in the information state is between information which is private to the agent and that which is shared between the dialogue participants. The private part of the information state contains a plan eld holding a dialogue plan, i.e. is a list of dialogue actions that the agent wishes to carry out. The agenda eld, on the other hand, contains the short term goals or obligations that the agent

has, i.e. what the agent is going to do next. We have included a eld tmp that mirrors the shared elds. This eld keeps track of shared information that has not yet been conrmed as grounded, i.e. as having been understood by the other dialogue participant. The shared eld is divided into a local and a global part. The local part contains information about the latest utterance, and information which may be relevant for interpreting it. The rst subeld is for a stack of questions under discussion (qud). These are questions that can currently be answered elliptically. The lu eld contains information about the speaker of, and the moves performed in, latest utterance. The global part contains shared information which reects the global state of the dialogue. It contains a set of propositions (commitments) which the agent assumes have been jointly committed to in the dialogue (com). In order to include Issues Under Negotiation and alternative answers to issues on IUN in the information state, we have also added a new information state eld of type OpenStack(Pair(Question,Set(Answer)))4. We dene update rules for updating the information state based on the recognized move(s). The rules are dened in terms of preconditions and eects on the information state; the eects are a list of operations to be executed if the preconditions are true. Regarding the semantics of questions, propositions, and short answers, we use a simplied version of rst order logic with the addition of lambda abstracts for representing questions. Questions and answers can be combined to form propositions. For example, the content of \when do you want to leave?" can be represented as ?x.desired dept time(x), the answer \twelve thirty" as 12:30, and the proposition resulting from combining the two desired dept time(12:30). As a further example, the proposition that a certain ight (denoted f1) departs at 7:45 is represented as dept time(f1,0745). For a more comprehensive description of the semantics used, see (Larsson, 2002).
4The

choice of a stack is motivated by the fact that several issues may, in principle, be under negotiation at once, and that some issues may be subordinate to others. An open stack is a stack where non-topmost elements are accessible for inspection and deletion.

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Define the Issues The initial step when planning for a negotiation is to define the issues to be discussed. A negotiation usually involves a couple of big issues and several smaller ones. For example, when buying a car the major issues are typically price and make. The minor issues may include model, color, mileage, and other additional features that are relevant, but are not alone enough to make or break a deal. In any conflict, an inclusive inventory of the issues can be found by using these resources: 1. Analyzing our own history in comparable negotiations (e.g. your last vehicle purchasing experience). 2. Researching information beforehand (e.g. obtaining Kelley Blue Book values of the cars you are interested in purchasing). 3. Seeking advice from professionals to get their take on the situation (e.g. bring the car to an independent mechanic to do a throughout check of all the cars vital functions). Create the Bargaining Mix In the car purchasing example, an agreement depends on several issues: price, make, model, color, mileage, etc. This list of issues in a negotiation is what comprises the bargaining mix. Each of these items can have its own starting, target, and resistance points. Some of these items will be important to both parties, (like the price of the car) while others may be relevant to only one side (such as color of the car). You need to be aware of which issues affect each side of the negotiation so that you can take the information into consideration in the planning process. Define Your Interests After you have identified the issues, you will define the purpose of the negotiation by bringing interests and needs to the surface. Identifying issues helps us classify what we want and defining interests helps to answer why. Asking why can help you discover critical values, principles, or needs that you seek to achieve in the negotiation. The next step in the negotiation planning process well cover in this series deals with Consulting with Others prior to the negotiation. To follow the next steps in this series, sign up to automatically receive new posts using your RSS Reader.