A Dynamic Strategy Coach for Effective Negotiation

Yiheng Zhou, He He, Alan W Black, Yulia Tsvetkov


Abstract
Negotiation is a complex activity involving strategic reasoning, persuasion, and psychology. An average person is often far from an expert in negotiation. Our goal is to assist humans to become better negotiators through a machine-in-the-loop approach that combines machine’s advantage at data-driven decision-making and human’s language generation ability. We consider a bargaining scenario where a seller and a buyer negotiate the price of an item for sale through a text-based dialogue. Our negotiation coach monitors messages between them and recommends strategies in real time to the seller to get a better deal (e.g., “reject the proposal and propose a price”, “talk about your personal experience with the product”). The best strategy largely depends on the context (e.g., the current price, the buyer’s attitude). Therefore, we first identify a set of negotiation strategies, then learn to predict the best strategy in a given dialogue context from a set of human-human bargaining dialogues. Evaluation on human-human dialogues shows that our coach increases the profits of the seller by almost 60%.
Anthology ID:
W19-5943
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue
Month:
September
Year:
2019
Address:
Stockholm, Sweden
Editors:
Satoshi Nakamura, Milica Gasic, Ingrid Zukerman, Gabriel Skantze, Mikio Nakano, Alexandros Papangelis, Stefan Ultes, Koichiro Yoshino
Venue:
SIGDIAL
SIG:
SIGDIAL
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
367–378
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5943
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-5943
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiheng Zhou, He He, Alan W Black, and Yulia Tsvetkov. 2019. A Dynamic Strategy Coach for Effective Negotiation. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue, pages 367–378, Stockholm, Sweden. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Dynamic Strategy Coach for Effective Negotiation (Zhou et al., SIGDIAL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-5943.pdf