Bridging the Gap: Face-to-Face Negotiations with Automated Mediator

Mediation is an important paradigm for dispute resolution. It can lead to “win-win” situations and benefit all parties. Yet, when people negotiate they demonstrate bounded rationality in their actions and diversity in their behaviors. This increases the difficulty to design automated mediators. To be successful, the mediator must take this into account and propose solutions deemed relevant, otherwise it will lose the focus and trust of the negotiators. To tackle these difficulties we present AniMed* – an automated animated mediator, incorporated with a novel proposal generation strategy, aimed to increase the social benefit of the negotiating parties. To validate the benefits of using AniMed* in negotiations, experiments were conducted with 130 people negotiating with each other. The results demonstrate the significant increase both in the social welfare and the individual utilities of both parties, compared to negotiations in which another version of reduced functionalities of AniMed* was used, as well as negotiations involving another stateof-the-art automated mediator or no mediator.