A Dynamic Strategy Coach for Effective Negotiation
Yiheng Zhou, He He, Alan W. Black, Yulia Tsvetkov · 2019
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 decisionmaking 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%. 1