A Supervised Topic Model Approach to Learning Effective Styles within Human-Agent Negotiation

We present a method that analyzes a person's negotiation behavior to automatically detect co-occurrence of tactics and combination of tactics (i.e., negotiation styles). We first identify action features consistent with use of the common negotiation tactics based on prior research in negotiation. Next, we apply regularized linear regression over a negotiation dataset to assess how effective particular tactics are in predicting the negotiation outcome. Finally, we use a supervised variant of a topic model to derive effective negotiation styles. Results from the clusters produced by the topic models provide insights regarding the effectiveness of negotiation styles that people utilize.