Let’s Chat to Negotiate: Designing a Conversational Agent for Learning Negotiation Skills

Negotiating is relevant in private and work-life situations. Thus, negotiation skills are necessary and can be defined as a skill set, including skills such as problem-solving or communication. Negotiating with others is learned action-oriented and individually, making standard learning concepts less effective. Therefore, action-oriented and individual-adapted interactions are convenient but rarely available. Conversational agents seem to be a suitable solution to support the negotiation learning process so it can be more interactive and individualized. In this paper, we design a conversational agent that can act as a personal tutor and negotiation partner to support a learner in training negotiation skills. This paper presents evaluated design principles for designing conversational agents to foster learners’ negotiation skills. The theoretically grounded design principles contribute to the existing theory on learning negotiation skills. On a practical level, we offer a new way of negotiation training that focuses on individuality and interactivity while providing a comprehensive learning concept for learning negotiation skills. Finally, companies are guided in the design and development of negotiation agents.