Optimal Incremental Preference Elicitation during Negotiation

The last two decades have seen a growing interest in the development of automated agents that are able to negotiate on the user’s behalf. When representing a user in a negotiation, it is essential for the agent to understand the user’s preferences, without exposing them to elicitation fatigue. To this end, we propose a new model in which a negotiating agent may incrementally elicit the user’s preference during the negotiation. We introduce an optimal elicitation strategy that decides, at every stage of the negotiation, how much additional user information to extract at a certain cost. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by combining our policy with well-known negotiation strategies and show that it significantly outperforms other elicitation strategies.