Preference interdependencies in a multi-issue salary negotiation

Abstract

Negotiation is an important potential application domain for intelligent virtual agents but, unlike research on agent-agent negotiations, agents that negotiate with people often adopt unrealistic simplifying assumptions. These assumptions not only limit the generality of these agents, but call into question scientific findings about how people negotiate with agents. Here we relax two common assumptions: the use of assigned rather than elicited user preferences, and the use of linear utility functions. Using a simulated salary negotiation, we find that relaxing these assumptions helps reveal interesting individual differences in how people negotiate their salary and allows algorithms to find better win-win solutions.