Whom should I persuade during a negotiation? An approach based on social inuence maximization

ARIEL MONTESERIN; ANALIA ADRIANA AMANDI

DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

ELSEVIER SCIENCE BV

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2015 vol. 77 p. 1 - 20

0167-9236

During a negotiation, an agent must make several key decisions in order to achieve a protable agreement. When the negotiation is carried out in a social context, agents can use persuasion, besides the traditional exchange of concessions. To carry out the persuasion and make concessions, the agents must employ resources that are usually scarce. For this reason, the agents should carefully decide which opponent they should persuade to maximise their prot, especially when the negotiation involves multiple parties. To make this decision, we propose that the agents should persuade the opponents with a high inuence on the other agents involved in the negotiation. Therefore, we represent a negotiation context as a social inuence maximization problem and solve it under a model that learns how inuence ows in a network by analysing historical information. This allows an agent to determine what opponents exert the highest inuence. Finally, the agent uses this information to decide which opponent to persuade during the negotiation. Experimental results showed that the agreement rate increased when agents applied this approach.