Cultural Models, Collaborations and Negotiation

Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh will lead in designing, conducting, and analyzing data from online negotiation experiments. Observing interactive negotiation is necessary to capture the processes to analyze and understand the dynamics of cooperation and negotiation and tipping points that could lead to beneficial or disastrous effects. Identifying such dynamic effects and the conditions that lead to them requires observing actual cross cultural negotiations. Studies of this type are difficult because of language differences and geographic separation of suitable subject populations. To overcome these obstacles University of Pittsburgh researchers will develop and use a browser-based negotiation environment to allow participants from remote countries/cultures to negotiate over the internet. Language differences will be surmounted by having subjects compose offers and arguments using lists and menus in their native languages making large studies feasible. Smaller more focused studies will use webcams, microphones, and translators to overcome the artificiality of non-spoken interaction. The logs depicting the negotiation process will then be provided to other researchers on the project for model-tracing and analysis of process variables as well as rater judgments and analysis of the course of the negotiation by SMEs and anthropologists. Experimental negotiations using these methods will be studied both within and between cultures to identify aspects of the process that are universal, culturally determined, or exhibit unexpected effects due to cultural interactions. In the final phases of the project these simulations will be adapted to produce experimental systems for training military negotiators using both the textual online interface and a virtual environment with synthetic agents developed by another research group on the project.