First steps in chat-based negotiating agents

To date, a variety of automated negotiation agents have been created. While each of these agents has been shown to be effective in negotiating with people in specific environments, they lack natural language processing (NLP) methods required to enable real-world types of interactions. In this paper we study how existing agents must be modified to address this limitation. After performing an extensive study of agents’ negotiation with human subjects, we found that simply modifying existing agents to include an NLP module is insufficient to create these agents. Instead the agents’ strategies must be modified to address offers that do not include values for all the discussed issues (as is the case in menu-based interfaces) and consequently issue-by-issue interactions.