Providing Decision Support for Negotiation: The Need for Adding Notions of Fairness to Those of Interests

In this article, we address the issue of how to integrate notions of fairness and justice into an interest-based negotiation support system. Even though the issue of power in negotiations is an important one, we do not address it in this article. Instead, we illustrate our ideas in two legal domains in which we have been constructing negotiation decision support systems: plea bargaining and Australian family law mediation. Negotiators have constructed two systems that provide decision support for negotiation. Family Mediator is an extension of the Family Winner system, which advises mediators about potential trade-offs and compensation strategies for divorcing couples. In addition, negotiators have developed a sentencing decision support system that advises upon likely sentences in the Victorian Magistrates Court and facilitates plea bargaining about sentences. This article will discuss the development of these systems