How Computers Can Help Us Negotiate

People negotiate everywhere, including in life-changing events, such as the purchase of a house. By automating these negotiations, computers can help support humans when making difficult decisions and make them more manageable and comprehensible.
In this talk, Tim Baarslag presents his ongoing research on intelligent negotiation systems and how he applied this research when he bought his first house. One of the key challenges in designing a successful automated negotiator is that only limited information is available about the buyer and the seller. Therefore, we need to investigate various decision and learning techniques to help the user determine what questions to ask, what offers to make, and when to accept. Baarslag provides some intuition behind some of the solution concepts, together with a roadmap for the successful design of intelligent negotiation support systems.

Tim Baarslag is a Scientific Staff Member at the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), the national research institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands. He is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Nagoya University of Technology and Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton. He currently investigates how negotiation AI can learn to haggle on behalf of users. His research is featured in Science Magazine, Wired, and New Scientist.