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The Impact of Implicit Information Exchange in Human-agent Negotiations

Published: 19 October 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Intelligent virtual agents have been developed to study, assess and teach a variety of human interpersonal skills. Here we examine the impact of an agent's perspective-taking sophistication on human negotiators. Good perspective-takers can discover creative solutions that benefit both parties, but many have difficulty with this skill. In particular, novices focus on explicit goal-statements (e.g., "I want apples more than bananas") but discount goal-relevant information implicit in the opponent's offers. Many human-agent negotiation agents similarly ignore implicit information. We examined the influence of implicit information on human negotiators by independently enhancing agents in two ways: do agents communicate implicit information and do they attend to implicit information communicated by users. We find that communicating implicit information seems to confuse user's perspective-taking ability, yet paradoxically, helps lead them to better outcomes. In contrast, an agent that attends to user's implicit communications shows better perspective-taking but fails to translate this into better outcomes. These results emphasize the challenges associated with implicit information. We discuss how these results impact the design of negotiation agents for applications, analysis and pedagogy.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    IVA '20: Proceedings of the 20th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
    October 2020
    394 pages
    ISBN:9781450375863
    DOI:10.1145/3383652
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 19 October 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. Human-agent Negotiation
    2. Opponent Modeling

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    • Refereed limited

    Funding Sources

    • US Army
    • National Science Foundation

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    IVA '20
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    IVA '20: ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents
    October 20 - 22, 2020
    Scotland, Virtual Event, UK

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    • (2025)A Game-Theoretic Model of Trust in Human–Robot Teaming: Guiding Human Observation Strategy for Monitoring Robot BehaviorIEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems10.1109/THMS.2024.348855955:1(37-47)Online publication date: Feb-2025
    • (2024)Teaching Reverse Appraisal to Improve Negotiation SkillsIEEE Transactions on Affective Computing10.1109/TAFFC.2023.328593115:3(872-884)Online publication date: Jul-2024
    • (2024)A survey of automated negotiation: Human factor, learning, and applicationComputer Science Review10.1016/j.cosrev.2024.10068354(100683)Online publication date: Nov-2024
    • (2023)Preference learning from emotional expressions contributes integrative solutions between human-AI negotiation2023 11th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW)10.1109/ACIIW59127.2023.10388197(1-7)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2023
    • (2022)The Case for Negotiation Robots in simulated workplace negotiations A Theoretical ApproachProceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting10.1177/107118132266138366:1(1095-1099)Online publication date: 27-Oct-2022
    • (2022)The need for a female perspective in designing agent-based negotiation supportProceedings of the 22nd ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3514197.3549691(1-8)Online publication date: 6-Sep-2022
    • (2021)Effect of politeness strategies in dialogue on negotiation outcomesProceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents10.1145/3472306.3478336(195-202)Online publication date: 14-Sep-2021
    • (2021)The Promise and Peril of Automated NegotiatorsNegotiation Journal10.1111/nejo.1234837:1(13-34)Online publication date: 6-Feb-2021

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