Abstract

Agent technologies promise to have positive impact on conducting electronic negotiations. In particular, agents can help the negotiating parties to express their preferences and desired negotiation strategies, assist in generating promising offers, evaluate incoming offers and "watch over the shoulder" of the user to ensure that he or she makes offers in accordance with the objectives/preferences specified. The focus of this work is on empirical investigation of the value of agent support to the negotiators in conducting electronic negotiations. To this end, an agent-enhanced e-negotiation system "eAgora" has been used. In this system, an intelligent agent is used in an advisory mode to inform the negotiating parties about different aspects of on-going negotiations. The experiments have been conducted involving subjects with and without agent support for simple and complex negotiation tasks. The results suggest that, agent-supported negotiations have a positive impact in terms of user satisfaction with the negotiation process and outcome, perceived usefulness and ease of use of the system, confidence in the negotiation outcome, and negotiation outcome.