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ABSTRACT

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 effectiveness 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.

REFERENCES

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.1 Multimedia Information Systems

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors, Measurement, Performance

Keywords:
balance theory, life-like agents, persuasion, social relations