A Strategy for Efficient Persuasion Dialogues

Several dialogue types, including inquiry, persuasion and deliberation, transfer information between agents so that their beliefs and opinions may be revised. The speech acts in different dialogue types have different pragmatic implications. For a representative sub-type of persuasion dialogues we consider how they can be conducted efficiently, in terms of minimising the expected transfer of information, and develop a strategy for efficient persuasion by exploiting the pragmatic implications. We demonstrate that our strategy is optimal for this sub-type.