The effects of cooperative agent behavior on human cooperativeness

Within negotiation environments, cooperative behavior may emerge from different factors. In this paper, we focus on human-agent interaction and in particular on the question of how the cooperativeness of a software agent affects the cooperativeness of a human player. We implemented three different kinds of agent behavior to determine how they influence helpful human behavior. Our data shows that humans behave more cooperatively towards agents that negotiate with them in a cooperative way and that humans tend to punish egoistic and unfair play by behaving non-cooperatively themselves.