Negotiating Agents

Abstract

opinion about his or her negotiation skills. However, even professional negotiators can still improve their skills considerably. “Most people are ineffective negotiators .... Fewer than 4 percent of managers reach win-win outcomes when put to the test .... Even on issues for which people were in perfect agreement, they fail to realize it 50 percent of the time” (Thompson 2005). Although many forms of negotiation exist, in this article we focus on integrative bargaining (see Walton and McKersie 1965). Negotiation is a prime example of a task for which the human mind is but partially equipped, and for which artificial intelligence (AI) can provide assistance. Among others AI can provide search techniques, computational heuristics to tackle exponential problem spaces, strategic reasoning, argumentation, learning techniques, and affective computing to handle the complications that arise in negotiations. More difficult problems that are not as easily solved by artificial intelligence techniques, however, include obtaining the common knowledge necessary to understand negotiation domains and arbitrary human conversations that take place during negotiations. We aim for synergy between human and agent in such a way that the human weaknesses are covered by the strengths of the agent and the weaknesses of the agent are covered by the strengths of the human. This implies that tasks should be divided over humans and agents in a way that respects those capabilities. On the one hand, humans are better equipped to understand the context and the emotional fluctuations in human-human interaction, they are capable of finding new Articles