How to Recognize and Explain Bidding Strategies in Negotiation Support Systems

Effective use of negotiation support systems depends on the systems capability of explaining itself to the user. This paper introduces the notion of an explanation matrix and an aberration detection mechanism for bidding strategies. The aberration detection is a mechanism that detects if one of the negotiating parties deviates from their expected behaviour, i.e. when a bid falls outside the range of expected behaviour for a specific strategy. The explanation matrix is used when to explain which aberrations to the user. The idea is that the user, when understanding the aberration, can take effective action to deal with the aberration. We implemented our aberration detection and our explanation mechanisms in the Pocket Negotiator (PN). We evaluated our work experimentally in a task in which participants are asked to identify their opponent’s bidding strategy, under different explanation conditions. As the number of correct guesses increases with explanations, indirectly, these experiments show the effectiveness of our aberration detection mechanism. Our experiments with over 100 participants show that suggesting consistent strategies is more effective than explaining why observed behaviour is inconsistent. An extended abstract of this article can be found in [15].