NegoChat: A chat-based negotiation agent

Avi Rosenfeld, Inon Zuckerman, Erel Segal-Halevi, Osnat Drein, Sarit Kraus

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Copyright © 2014, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved. 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 support required to enable real-world types of interactions. In this paper we present NegoChat, the first negotiation agent that successfully addresses this limitation. NegoChat contains several significant research contributions. First, 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 partial agreements and issue-by-issue interactions. Second, we present NegoChat's negotiation algorithm. This algorithm is based on bounded rationality, and specifically Aspiration Adaptation Theory (AAT). As per AAT, issues are addressed based on people's typical urgency, or order of importance. If an agreement cannot be reached based on the value the human partner demands, the agent retreats, or downwardly lowers the value of previously agreed upon issues so that a "good enough" agreement can be reached on all issues. This incremental approach is fundamentally different from all other negotiation agents, including the state-of-the-art KBAgent. Finally, we present a rigorous evaluation of NegoChat, showing its effectiveness.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)525-532
Number of pages8
Journal13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2014
Volume1
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2014

Cite this