The influence of task contexts on the decision-making of humans and computers

Ya'akov Gal, Barbara Grosz, Avi Pfeffer, Stuart Shieber, Alex Allain

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

Many environments in which people and computer agents interact involve deploying resources to accomplish tasks and satisfy goals. This paper investigates the way that the context in which decisions are made affects the behavior of people and the performance of computer agents that interact with people in such environments. It presents experiments that measured negotiation behavior in two different types of settings. One setting was a task context that made explicit the relationships among goals, (sub)tasks and resources. The other setting was a completely abstract context in which only the payoffs for the decision choices were listed. Results show that people are more helpful, less selfish, and less competitive when making decisions in task contexts than when making them in completely abstract contexts. Further, their overall performance was better in task contexts. A predictive computational model that was trained on data obtained in the task context outperformed a model that was trained under the abstract context. These results indicate that taking context into account is essential for the design of computer agents that will interact well with people.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationModeling and Using Context - 6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference, CONTEXT 2007, Proceedings
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages206-219
Number of pages14
ISBN (Print)9783540742548
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Jan 2007
Externally publishedYes
Event6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, CONTEXT 2007 - Roskilde, Denmark
Duration: 20 Aug 200724 Aug 2007

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume4635 LNAI
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference6th International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context, CONTEXT 2007
Country/TerritoryDenmark
CityRoskilde
Period20/08/0724/08/07

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • General Computer Science

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