Negotiating with other minds: the role of recursive theory of mind in negotiation with incomplete information
Authored by Rineke Verbrugge, Bart Verheij, Weerd Harmen de
Date Published: 2017
DOI: 10.1007/s10458-015-9317-1
Sponsors:
Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO)
Platforms:
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Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Mathematical description
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
Theory of mind refers to the ability to reason explicitly about
unobservable mental content of others, such as beliefs, goals, and
intentions. People often use this ability to understand the behavior of
others as well as to predict future behavior. People even take this
ability a step further, and use higher-order theory of mind by reasoning
about the way others make use of theory of mind and in turn attribute
mental states to different agents. One of the possible explanations for
the emergence of the cognitively demanding ability of higher-order
theory of mind suggests that it is needed to deal with mixed-motive
situations. Such mixed-motive situations involve partially overlapping
goals, so that both cooperation and competition play a role. In this
paper, we consider a particular mixed-motive situation known as Colored
Trails, in which computational agents negotiate using alternating offers
with incomplete information about the preferences of their trading
partner. In this setting, we determine to what extent higher-order
theory of mind is beneficial to computational agents. Our results show
limited effectiveness of first-order theory of mind, while second-order
theory of mind turns out to benefit agents greatly by allowing them to
reason about the way they can communicate their interests. Additionally,
we let human participants negotiate with computational agents of
different orders of theory of mind. These experiments show that people
spontaneously make use of second-order theory of mind in negotiations
when their trading partner is capable of second-order theory of mind as
well.
Tags
Agent
Simulation
Evolution
Cooperation
models
Incomplete information
Negotiation
Theory of mind
Beliefs
cognition
Agent-based
models
Environments
Normal-form games
Cognitive hierarchy
Opponent modeling
Higher-order theory
Bayesian players