Proceedings of the 1st International Working Conference on Human Factors and Computational Models in Negotiation
Authors: Koen V. Hindriks, Willem-Paul Brinkman
Venue: International Working Conference on Human Factors and Computational Models in Negotiation (2008)

These are the proceedings of the First International Working Conference on Human Factors and Computational Models in Negotiation. The aim of this conference is to bring researchers from various disciplines together who share a common interest in developing negotiation support systems. It is our belief that the development of effective support systems for negotiation requires study of human negotiation, of computational models of negotiation, as well as of the end user of the system and its interaction. Negotiation is a complex and sometimes emotional decision-making process aiming to reach an agreement to exchange goods or services. Although a daily activity, extensive research has shown that few people are effective negotiators. Negotiation support systems can help make a significant improvement in negotiation performance. These systems have been studied for quite some time now and, more recently, negotiation has also become an increasingly important field of research in Artificial Intelligence. Whereas current state of the art negotiation support systems do not yet incorporate some of the more advanced techniques developed within Artificial Intelligence, e.g. with respect to learning an opponent model, it is not straightforward how to include such techniques into a support system in such a way that they contribute to the performance of an end user. It is therefore important to take a user-centered perspective while trying to build the next generation of support systems that do incorporate more recent techniques from Artificial Intelligence. Moreover, because of the inherent semantic problem and the emotional issues involved negotiation cannot be handled by Artificial Intelligence alone, and a human-machine collaborative system is required. Such systems are not only to support humans in providing strategic advice but should also assist in coping with emotions and moods in human-human interactions. One of the major challenges therefore is how to design and build negotiation support systems where the human and the machine cooperate in a synergetic manner and interact and exchange information such that the strengths of both are exploited maximally. More specifically, in order to develop human-machine collaborative negotiation support systems there is a need for the development of computational models, frameworks, and experimental, user-centered and ergonomic methods that enable the engineering of negotiation support systems. It is important for this purpose to study the role of human factors in negotiation as well as computational models to enable intelligent support for negotiation. To develop the next generation of negotiation support systems there are still many, diverse challenges, including, for example, models of qualitative, incomplete preferences, preference change and elicitation, models of emotion and user awareness, user interfaces for negotiation support, conflict handling styles, and experimental methods for assessing, e.g., negotiation performance. We hope that this conference will contribute to and stimulate new research that aims at combining the results and strengths of various disciplines to address these challenges.