Recognising and explaining bidding strategies in negotiation support systems

Recognising and explaining bidding strategies in negotiation support systems

Koeman, V.J. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)
Hindriks, K.V. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)
Gratch, Jonathan (University of Southern California)
Jonker, C.M. (TU Delft Interactive Intelligence)

2019

To improve a negotiator's ability to recognise bidding strategies, we pro-actively provide explanations that are based on the opponent's bids and the negotiator's guesses about the opponent's strategy. We introduce an aberration detection mechanism for recognising strategies and the notion of an explanation matrix. The aberration detection mechanism identifies when a bid falls outside the range of expected behaviour for a specific strategy. The explanation matrix is used to decide when to provide what explanations. We evaluated our work experimentally in a task in which participants are asked to identify their opponent's strategy in the environment of a negotiation support system, namely the Pocket Negotiator (PN). We implemented our explanation mechanism in the PN and experimented with different explanation matrices. As the number of correct guesses increases with explanations, indirectly, these experiments show the effectiveness of our aberration detection mechanism. Our experiments with over 100 participants show that suggesting consistent strategies is more effective than explaining why observed behaviour is inconsistent.

Aberration detection
Bidding strategies
Explanation matrix
Negotiation support system
Strategy recognition

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b3b15e38-7deb-45d0-8aeb-4f6a0771ebb6

10.5555/3306127.3332011

International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS)

2020-07-31

978-1-4503-6309-9

18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2019, 4

18th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2019, 2019-05-13 → 2019-05-17, Montreal, Canada

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care   Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

conference paper

© 2019 V.J. Koeman, K.V. Hindriks, Jonathan Gratch, C.M. Jonker