Mechanism Design for Argumentation-based Persuasion

Recently we have seen a few development in argumentation-based dialogue systems, but there is less research in understanding agents’ strategic behaviour in dialogues. We study agent strategies by linking a specific form of argumentation-based dialogues and mechanism design. Specifically, focusing on persuasion dialogues, we show how dialogues can be mapped to concepts in mechanism design. We prove that a “truthful” and “thorough” dialogue strategy is a dominant strategy under specific conditions. We also prove that a mechanism using this dialogue strategy implements a “persuasion social choice function” we define. These results show the validity of the proposed strategies for agents in persuasion and the feasibility of studying persuasion with mechanism design techniques.