Negotiating task allocation in a team with the help of a negotiator agent

Abstract

With the prevalence of artificial intelligence recently, more attention is being drawn towards the collaboration between humans and agents. Across the many fields where such an agent can be employed, we are going to specifically examine the domain of negotiation. A critical part to ensure success in this human-agent collaboration is to establish trust between the user and the agent. When considering negotiations, different strategies can be employed by the negotiation agents, the specific negotiation agent we shall use in our study employs the so called "hardliner negotiation style", which can be thought of as taking an uncompromising stance. When introducing the agent, we will either show a neutral introduction which does not mention the choice of strategy or show the hardliner introduction which does cover the chosen strategy. We are going to investigate how the choice of introduction affects the trust of humans in the negotiation agent. Leading us to the research question: What's the effect of an agent using a truthful explanation of their hardliner negotiation style versus a neutral explanation on how much humans trust and rely on the agent to negotiate for them? A between-subjects study took place to answer the question which has indicated that there is no significant difference (U = 111, p = 0.97 two-tailed, α = 0.05) between the two different introductions.