The Impact of Implicit Information Exchange in Human-agent Negotiations

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.

The need for a female perspective in designing agent-based negotiation support

“…Especially for the experimental group, the NTS design included a number of additional preparation steps. Consequently, the non-significant effect of Strategic Empathy on persistence could be due to the substantial cognitive load of the experiment for the experimental group [19].…”

“…Human negotiators are influenced by not just economic trade-offs but also by subjective factors, such as losing face, reputation, and maintaining a good relationship [20]. Consequently, research has started to focus on establishing an understanding of the effect of interpersonal factors and the integration of Affective Computing [6,19,44].…”

“…Participants learn how to maximize personal or mutual gain, make effective concessions, and when to accept or walk away [22,23]. This approach relates to the work of Gratch and Johnson [19], in which teaching perspective-taking is integrated in the interactive phase. Their agent expresses its aims through implicit information, providing patterns, to train a participant's perspective-taking capabilities.…”

“…According to [46], negotiations are profound psychological processes in which empathy and emotional intelligence can lead to superior outcomes. Successful negotiators should focus on perspective-taking -i.e., attempts at understanding the opponent's incentives, desires, and boundaries [19]. This approach, frequently referred to as Strategic Empathy, suggests that a different set of traits, centered around social intuition, flexibility, and empathic capabilities, is significantly influential in negotiations [38,39].…”

The Promise and Peril of Automated Negotiators

“…For example, they can simulate how mental models are shaped by emotion (de Melo et al 2012). They can capture how negotiators often underestimate the opportunity for mutually beneficial solutions or how they fail to attend to information provided by their partner (Johnson and Gratch 2020). They can model how negotiator behavior changes when certain issues are seen as sacred (Dehghani, Carnevale, and Gratch 2014).…”