The Role of Negotiation in Collaborative Activity
Candace L. Sidner · 1993
In problem solving, people often recognize that they have goals in common. To achieve their common goals, they plan and act jointly. Collaboration sustains these activities, which is to say, that working together and working to achieve shared goals defines collaboration. People are agents in collaboration, that is, actors who have goals and can have effects in the world. To collaborate, agents negotiate; they interactively come to agreement on actions and beliefs that com-prise the planning and acting decisions leading to the common goal. Negotiation is fundamental to all col-laboration because agents need to agree in order to act together. Collaborators accomplish negotiation through discourses, which are extended forms of lin-guistic communication, spoken or written. The most common type of discourse for collaboration is conversa-tion. These conversations are not large scale transfers of information; rather they constitute the process of reaching agreement on beliefs and intentions that make it possible for the collaborators to act individually or collectively. These conversations are well-structured. Structure is critical to the negotiation process because it helps the collaborators determine the role individual utterances play in the negotiation. A sample conversation is presented in Figure 1. This conversation between two people in the course of a bi-weekly meeting concerns the task of automating one person’s (K’s) job. While K is willing to collaborate attaining this goal, she does not know what will make that possible. M and K’s conversation negotiates the details of what is to be done. A later portion of this same conversation (not shown) concerns who will the task and when. M and K’s conversation demonstrates a fundamen-tal fact about collaboration: collaboration is based on the establishment of beliefs among collaborators. The conversation displays several properties of the "Shared-Plan " model of collaboration (c.f. [GS90, GK93]). and K establish beliefs about the recipe, that is, the actions that will result in their goal when M and K eventually undertake them. As the SharedPlan model indicates, M and K seek to make their privately held beliefs mutual beliefs, that is, beliefs that they each