Fixed-Pie Lie In Action

Negotiation is a crucial skill for socially intelligent agents. Sometimes negotiators lie to gain advantage. In particular, they can claim that they want the same thing as their opponents (i.e., use a "fixed-pie lie") to gain an advantage while appearing fair. The current work is the first attempt to examine effectiveness of this strategy when used by agents against humans in realistic negotiation settings. Using the IAGO platform, we show that the exploitative agent indeed wins more points while appearing fair and honest to its opponent. In a second study, we investigated how far the exploitative agents could push for more gain and examined their effect on people's behavior. This study shows that even though exploitative agents gained high value in short-term, their long-term success remains questioned as they left their opponents unhappy and unsatisfied.