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arXiv · 1909.13426

A Dynamic Strategy Coach for Effective Negotiation

Yiheng Zhou·He He·Alan W Black·Yulia Tsvetkov
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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 dialog. Our negotiation coach monitors messages between them and recommends tactics 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 and tactics largely depend on the context (e.g., the current price, the buyer's attitude). Therefore, we first identify a set of negotiation tactics, then learn to predict the best strategy and tactics in a given dialog context from a set of human-human bargaining dialogs. Evaluation on human-human dialogs shows that our coach increases the profits of the seller by almost 60%.

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Yiheng Zhou, He He, Alan W Black, Yulia Tsvetkov. 2019-09-30. A Dynamic Strategy Coach for Effective Negotiation. https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.13426

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