Influence of social relationships on multiagent persuasion

Life-like agents have the potential to make e-shopping sites on the Web more attractive and persuasive; our interest is to determine how multiple life-like agents should behave as a team to persuade customers. To know how the social relationships among two agents and a human user impacts the eectiveness of persuasion from the viewpoint of the balance theory, we develop a multi-agent persuasion system. In the system, the agents construct a social relationship to the user, and they then try to persuade him/her to select items that they recommend. An evaluation shows that a balanced relationship yields better performance than an imbalanced one. Categories and Subject Descriptors I.2.11 [Distributed Articial Intelligence]: Multiagent systems; H.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems]: Articial, augmented, and virtual realities General Terms Measurement, Performance, Design, Experimentation, Human Factors Keywords Life-like agents, Social relations, Balance theory, Persuasion

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Katsunori Kadowaki, Kazuki Kobayashi, Yasuhiko Kitamura
• Keywords: ATAL 2008, Intelligent Agents, Life-like Agents, Multiple Life-like Agents, Social Relationship