Bidding Support by the Pocket Negotiator Improves Negotiation Outcomes

by Reyhan Aydoğan, and Catholijn M. Jonker

This paper presents the negotiation support mechanisms provided by the Pocket Negotiator (PN) and an elaborate empirical evaluation of the economic decision support (EDS) mechanisms during the bidding phase of negotiations as provided by the PN. Some of these support mechanisms are offered actively, some passively. With passive support we mean that the user only gets that support by clicking a button, whereas active support is provided without prompting. Our results show, that PN improves negotiation outcomes, counters cognitive depletion, and encourages exploration of potential outcomes. We found that the active mechanisms were used more effectively than the passive ones and, overall, the various mechanisms were not used optimally, which opens up new avenues for research. As expected, the participants with higher negotiation skills outperformed the other groups, but still they benefited from PN support. Our experimental results show that people with enough technical skills and with some basic negotiation knowledge will benefit most from PN support. Our results also show that the cognitive depletion effect is reduced by Pocket Negotiator support. The questionnaire taken after the experiment shows that overall the participants found Pocket Negotiator easy to interact with, that it made them negotiate more quickly and that it improves their outcome. Based on our findings, we recommend to 1) provide active support mechanisms (push) to nudge users to be more effective, and 2) provide support mechanisms that shield the user from mathematical complexities.

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0561-4_4

@inproceedings{AydoganJ22a,
  author       = {Reyhan Aydogan and
                  Catholijn M. Jonker},
  editor       = {Rafik Hadfi and
                  Reyhan Aydogan and
                  Takayuki Ito and
                  Ryuta Arisaka},
  title        = {Bidding Support by the Pocket Negotiator Improves Negotiation Outcomes},
  booktitle    = {Recent Advances in Agent-Based Negotiation: Applications and Competition
                  Challenges, ACAN@IJCAI 2022, Vienna, Austria, July 24, 2022},
  series       = {Studies in Computational Intelligence},
  volume       = {1092},
  pages        = {52--83},
  publisher    = {Springer},
  year         = {2022},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0561-4\_4},
  doi          = {10.1007/978-981-99-0561-4\_4},
  timestamp    = {Tue, 28 Mar 2023 19:49:35 +0200},
  biburl       = {https://dblp.org/rec/conf/acan/AydoganJ22a.bib},
  bibsource    = {dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org}
}