A Cultural Decision-Making Model for Virtual Agents Playing Negotiation Games

We present a novel model of decision-making in social tasks for virtual humans. The model considers multiple valuations of the available choices in a decision set according to individual and social factors such as own utility, total group utility, and relative utility. Cultural differences are incorporated using Hofstede’s dimensional model of culture and affect the decision making process by changing the different weightings of the factors. We have integrated the decision model into the dialogue manager of a virtual human system, and developed protocols and dialogue capabilities to support virtual humans in playing a simple negotiation game (Ultimatum Game). We present evaluations between both a culturally oriented virtual human and a person and between two virtual humans (with different culture models).