Inter-cultural opponent behavior modeling in a POMDP based Automated Negotiating Agent

As the world gets increasingly networked, business and political negotiations take place between people of different cultures. Cross-cultural negotiations have been mainly studied empirically and there is a dearth of computational models of negotiation that incorporate the culture of the negotiators. In this chapter, we take the first steps towards building a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) based automated negotiation (PAN) agent, that takes the culture of the negotiators into account. We move away from the offer-counteroffer paradigm that is usually used in computational modeling of negotiation. We assume that apart from making offers, the agents can take other actions for seeking/providing information during negotiation. Our approach is motivated by the experimental findings that (a) during negotiation, people communicate their preferences and justification of their preferences apart from making direct offers and (b) cultural distinctions can be made between negotiating agents based on an abstract coding of their conversation. We show that in accordance with an existing cognitive theory of inter-cultural negotiation from behavioral psychology literature, we can construct a POMDP model of negotiation. A key challenge in developing the PAN agent is in obtaining the state transition function for the POMDP. We demonstrate that the state transition function can be built from transcripts of actual negotiations between people.