Human-Agent Negotiations: The Impact of Agents’ Concession Schedule and Task Complexity on Agreements

Past research had suggested different negotiation tactics for the agents, and had used them in experimental settings against human negotiators. This work explores the interaction between negotiation strategies and the complexity of the negotiation task as represented by the number of negotiation issues.

Including more issues in a negotiation potentially allows the parties more space to maneuver and, thus, promises higher likelihood of agreement. In practice, the consideration of more is-sues requires higher cognitive effort, which could have a negative effect on reaching an agreement. The results of humanagent negotiation experiments conducted at a major Canadian university revealed that there is an interaction between chosen strategy and task complexity.