Understanding an opponent's wants is crucial for maximizing the outcomes of a multi-issue negotiation. To do this, automated systems must build an "opponent model" from information conveyed during a negotiation. Bayesian and frequentist models are the most commonly used. Bayesian models have a principled way to incorporate prior knowledge about an opponent's preferences. However, frequentist models have outperformed Bayesian approaches in practice, dominating the yearly agent-verses-agent negotiation competitions. With growing interest in agents that negotiate with people, this presumed dominance needs to be revisited. Human opponents convey far less information than automated agents, and people often share similar preferences (e.g., in a salary negotiation, most people care the most about salary). Thus, the theoretical advantage of Bayesian approaches may translate into practice for agent-versus-human negotiation. In this work, we compare the performance of Bayesian models against a leading frequentist approach in an agent-versus-human multi-issue salary negotiation. Although we show that frequentist opponent models outperform Bayesian models when using a uniform prior, Bayesian approaches excel when using two common priors. The best performance is achieved with an empirically-derived prior (i.e., biasing the model space using the distribution of preferences found in past human negotiators). Yet, strong performance is also observed when using a "fixed-pie bias", the prior used by most human negotiators. We discuss the implication of these findings for research on human-agent negotiation.

Women earn less than men in technical fields. Competing theories have been offered to explain this disparity. Some argue that women underperform in negotiating their salary, in-part due to language in job descriptions, called gender triggers, which leave women feeling disadvantaged in salary negotiations. Others point to structural and institutional bias: i.e., recruiters make better offers to men even when women exhibit equal negotiation skills. As a final salary is co-constructed though an interaction between employees and recruiters, it is difficult to disentangle these views. Here, we discuss how intelligent virtual agents serve as powerful methodological tools that lend new insight into this psychological debate. We use virtual negotiators to examine the impact of gender triggers on computer science (CS) undergraduates that engaged in a simulated salary negotiation with an automated recruiter. We find that, regardless of gender, CS students are reluctant to negotiate, and this hesitancy likely lowers their starting salary. Even when they negotiate, students show little skill in discovering tradeoffs that could enhance their salary, highlighting the need for negotiation training in technical fields. Most importantly, we find little evidence that gender triggers impact women's negotiated outcomes, at least within the field of CS. We argue that findings that emphasize women's individual deficits may reflect a lack of experimental control, which intelligent agents can help correct, and that structural and institutional explanations of inequity deserve greater attention.

Intelligent virtual agents have been developed to study, assess and teach a variety of human interpersonal skills. Here we examine the impact of an agent's perspective-taking sophistication on human negotiators. Good perspective-takers can discover creative solutions that benefit both parties, but many have difficulty with this skill. In particular, novices focus on explicit goal-statements (e.g., "I want apples more than bananas") but discount goal-relevant information implicit in the opponent's offers. Many human-agent negotiation agents similarly ignore implicit information. We examined the influence of implicit information on human negotiators by independently enhancing agents in two ways: do agents communicate implicit information and do they attend to implicit information communicated by users. We find that communicating implicit information seems to confuse user's perspective-taking ability, yet paradoxically, helps lead them to better outcomes. In contrast, an agent that attends to user's implicit communications shows better perspective-taking but fails to translate this into better outcomes. These results emphasize the challenges associated with implicit information. We discuss how these results impact the design of negotiation agents for applications, analysis and pedagogy.

Negotiation is an integral part of our daily lives regardless of occupation. Although ubiquitous to our experience, we are never taught to negotiate. This lack of training presents many consequences from unfair salary negotiation to geopolitical ramification. The ability to resolve conflicts and negotiate is becoming more critical due to the rise of automated systems which look to replace various repetitive task jobs. In hopes of improving human negotiation skills, my work seeks to develop automated negotiation agents capable of providing personalized feedback. In this paper, I provide an overview of my past , current, and future work.

Research has shown that virtual agents can be effective tools for teaching negotiation. Virtual agents provide an opportuni-ty for students to practice their negotiation skills which leads to better outcomes. However, these negotiation training agents often lack the ability to understand the errors students make when negotiating, thus limiting their effectiveness as training tools. In this article, we argue that automated opponent-modeling techniques serve as effective methods for diagnos-ing important negotiation mistakes. To demonstrate this, we analyze a large number of participant traces generated while negotiating with a set of automated opponents. We show that negotiators' performance is closely tied to their understanding of an opponent's preferences. We further show that opponent modeling techniques can diagnose specific errors includ-ing: failure to elicit diagnostic information from an opponent, failure to utilize the information that was elicited, and failure to understand the transparency of an opponent. These results show that opponent modeling techniques can be effective methods for diagnosing and potentially correcting crucial ne-gotiation errors.

Recent research shows that how we respond to other social actors depends on what sort of mind we ascribe to them. In this article we examine how perceptions of a virtual agent's mind shape behavior in human-agent negotiations. We varied descriptions and communicative behavior of virtual agents on two dimensions according to the mind perception theory:agency (cognitive aptitude) andpatiency (affective aptitude). Participants then engaged in negotiations with the different agents. People scored more points and engaged in shorter negotiations with agents described to be cognitively intelligent, and got lower points and had longer negotiations with agents that were described to be cognitively unintelligent. Accordingly, agents described as having low agency ended up earning more points than those with high agency. Within the negotiations themselves, participants sent more happy and surprise emojis and emotionally valenced messages to agents described to be emotional. This high degree of described patiency also affected perceptions of the agent's moral standing and relatability. In short, manipulating the perceived mind of agents affects how people negotiate with them. We discuss these results, which show that agents are perceived not only as social actors, but as intentional actors through negotiations.

This work explores the extent to which social dialogue can mitigate (or exacerbate) the loss of trust caused when robots make conversational errors. Our study uses a NAO robot programmed to persuade users to agree with its rankings on two tasks. We perform two manipulations: (1) The timing of conversational errors - the robot exhibited errors either in the first task, the second task, or neither; (2) The presence of social dialogue - between the two tasks, users either engaged in a social dialogue with the robot or completed a control task. We found that the timing of the errors matters: replicating previous research, conversational errors reduce the robot's influence in the second task, but not on the first task. Social dialogue interacts with the timing of errors, acting as an intensifier: social dialogue helps the robot recover from prior errors, and actually boosts subsequent influence; but social dialogue backfires if it is followed by errors, because it extends the period of good performance, creating a stronger contrast effect with the subsequent errors. The design of social robots should therefore be more careful to avoid errors after periods of good performance than early on in a dialogue.

This work explores whether culture impacts the extent to which social dialogue can mitigate (or exacerbate) the loss of trust caused when agents make conversational errors. Our study uses an agent designed to persuade users to agree with its rankings on two tasks. Participants from the U.S. and Japan completed our study. We perform two manipulations: (1) The presence of conversational errors -- the agent exhibited errors in the second task or not; (2) The presence of social dialogue -- between the two tasks, users either engaged in a social dialogue with the agent or completed a control task. Replicating previous research, conversational errors reduce the agent's influence. However, we found that culture matters: there was a marginally significant three-way interaction with culture, presence of social dialogue, and presence of errors. The pattern of results suggests that, for American participants, social dialogue backfired if it is followed by errors, presumably because it extends the period of good performance, creating a stronger contrast effect with the subsequent errors. However, for Japanese participants, social dialogue if anything mitigates the detrimental effect of errors; the negative effect of errors is only seen in the absence of a social dialogue. Agent design should therefore take the culture of the intended users into consideration when considering use of social dialogue to bolster agents against conversational errors.

Social robots establish rapport with human users. This work explores the extent to which rapport-building can benefit (or harm) conversations with robots, and under what circumstances this occurs. For example, previous work has shown that agents that make conversational errors are less capable of influencing people than agents that do not make errors [1]. Some work has shown this effect with robots, but prior research has not considered additional factors such as the level of rapport between the person and the robot. We predicted that building rapport through a social dialogue (such as an ice-breaker) could mitigate the detrimental effect of a robot's errors on influence. Our study used a Nao robot programmed to persuade users to agree with its rankings on two "survival tasks" (e.g., lunar survival task). We manipulated both errors and social dialogue:the robot either exhibited errors in the second survival task or not, and users either engaged in an ice-breaker with the robot between the two survival tasks or completed a control task. Replicating previous research, errors tended to reduce the robot's influence in the second survival task. Contrary to our prediction, results revealed that the ice-breaker did not mitigate the effect of errors, and if anything, errors were more harmful after the ice-breaker (intended to build rapport) than in the control condition. This backfiring of attempted rapport-building may be due to a contrast effect, suggesting that the design of social robots should avoid introducing dialogues of incongruent quality.

We demonstrate two agents, a robot and a virtual human, which can be used for studying factors that impact social influence. The agents engage in dialogue scenarios that build familiarity, share information, and attempt to influence a human participant. The scenarios are variants of the classical “survival task,” where members of a team rank the importance of a number of items (e.g., items that might help one survive a crash in the desert). These are ranked individually and then re-ranked following a team discussion, and the difference in ranking provides an objective measure of social influence. Survival tasks have been used in psychology, virtual human research, and human-robot interaction. Our agents are operated in a “Wizard-of-Oz” fashion, where a hidden human operator chooses the agents’ dialogue actions while interacting with an experiment participant.