System and Method for Facilitating Bilateral and Multilateral Decision-Making

Abstract

Techniques for facilitating evaluation, in connection with the procurement or delivery of products or services, in a context of at least one of (i) a financial transaction and (ii) operation of an enterprise, are disclosed. The techniques involve retrieving party and counterparty preference profile data from digital storage media; performing multilateral analyses of the combined preference data by computing a closeness-of-fit value; and delivering a list matching the selected party and the at least one counterparty using the computed closeness-of-fit values.

1 . A computer-implemented method for facilitating evaluation, in connection with the procurement or delivery of products or services, in a context of at least one of (i) a financial transaction and (ii) operation of an enterprise, such context involving a first class of parties in a first role and a second class of counterparties in a second role, the method comprising:
 in a first computer process, retrieving first preference data from a first digital storage medium, the first preference data including attribute levels derived from choices made by at least one of the parties in the first class;   in a second computer process, retrieving second preference data from a second digital storage medium, the second preference data including attribute levels derived from choices made by at least one of the counterparties in the second class;   in a third computer process, for a selected party, performing multilateral analyses of the selected party's preference data and the preference data of each of the counterparties, and computing a closeness-of-fit value based thereon; and   in a fourth computer process, using the computed closeness-of-fit values to provide as an output a recommendation to the selected party of at least one of the counterparties for such procurement or delivery of products or services.   
     
     
         2 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the recommendation is a list wherein the at least one of the counterparties is ranked according to closeness of fit. 
     
     
         3 . A method according to  claim 1 , further comprising receiving co-evaluator choices made by a party co-evaluator or a counterparty co-evaluator, wherein the recommendation to the selected party of the at least one of the counterparties is determined according to a multilateral analysis of preference data determined using such co-evaluator choices. 
     
     
         4 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the party choices reveal, with respect to each level of each of a first series of attributes, a utility value which indicates the value that the party places on the level of the attribute. 
     
     
         5 . A method according to  claim 4 , wherein the party choices reveal the utility values without the utility values being provided explicitly. 
     
     
         6 . A method according to  claim 4 , wherein the counterparty choices reveal, with respect to each level of each of a second series of attributes that complements the first series of attributes, a utility value which indicates the value that the counterparty places on the level of the attribute. 
     
     
         7 . A method according to  claim 6 , wherein the counterparty choices reveal the utility values without the utility values being provided explicitly. 
     
     
         8 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein at least one of the first preference data, second preference data, and the list is obtained from a remote server over a communication network. 
     
     
         9 . A method according to  claim 1 , wherein the party choices and the counterparty choices are provided to a remote server over a communication network.