Recognising and explaining bidding strategies in negotiation support systems

Conference paper (2019)

Authors

V.J. Koeman Interactive Intelligence - EEMCS
K.V. Hindriks Interactive Intelligence - EEMCS
Jonathan Gratch University of Southern California
C.M. Jonker Interactive Intelligence - EEMCS
Research Group
Interactive Intelligence (EEMCS) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2019 V.J. Koeman, K.V. Hindriks, Jonathan Gratch, C.M. Jonker
DOI
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https://doi.org/10.5555/3306127.3332011
Aberration detection Bidding strategies Explanation matrix Negotiation support system Strategy recognition
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Published Date

2019

Language

English

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Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Department

Intelligent Systems

Research Group

Interactive Intelligence

Abstract

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.