TY - CONF
T1 - A cultural sensitive agent for human-computer negotiation
AU - Haim, Galit
AU - Gal, Ya'akov
AU - Kraus, Sarit
AU - Gelfand, Michele
PY - 2012
Y1 - 2012
N2 - People's cultural background has been shown to affect the way they reach agreements in negotiation and how they fulfill these agreements. This paper presents a novel agent design for negotiating with people from different cultures. Our setting involved an alternating-offer protocol that allowed parties to choose the extent to which they kept each of their agreements during the negotiation. A challenge to designing agents for such setting is to predict how people reciprocate their actions over time despite the scarcity of prior data of their behavior across different cultures. Our methodology addresses this challenge by combining a decision theoretic model with classical machine learning techniques to predict how people respond to offers, and the extent to which they fulfill agreements. The agent was evaluated empirically by playing with 157 people in three countries - Lebanon, the U.S., and Israel - in which people are known to vary widely in their negotiation behavior. The agent was able to outperform people in all countries under conditions that varied how parties depended on each other at the onset of the negotiation. This is the first work to show that a computer agent can learn to outperform people when negotiating in three countries representing different cultures.
AB - People's cultural background has been shown to affect the way they reach agreements in negotiation and how they fulfill these agreements. This paper presents a novel agent design for negotiating with people from different cultures. Our setting involved an alternating-offer protocol that allowed parties to choose the extent to which they kept each of their agreements during the negotiation. A challenge to designing agents for such setting is to predict how people reciprocate their actions over time despite the scarcity of prior data of their behavior across different cultures. Our methodology addresses this challenge by combining a decision theoretic model with classical machine learning techniques to predict how people respond to offers, and the extent to which they fulfill agreements. The agent was evaluated empirically by playing with 157 people in three countries - Lebanon, the U.S., and Israel - in which people are known to vary widely in their negotiation behavior. The agent was able to outperform people in all countries under conditions that varied how parties depended on each other at the onset of the negotiation. This is the first work to show that a computer agent can learn to outperform people when negotiating in three countries representing different cultures.
KW - Human-robot/agent interaction
KW - Negotiation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84899431891&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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AN - SCOPUS:84899431891
SP - 504
EP - 511
T2 - 11th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2012: Innovative Applications Track, AAMAS 2012
Y2 - 4 June 2012 through 8 June 2012
ER -