Persuasion Effect of the Number of Life-like Agents

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 effectiveness of persuasion depends on the number of agents, we develop a multi-agent persuasion system. In the experiment, we compared the performance of persuasion by one agent, two agents, and three agents respectively. The experimental result shows that two agents agreeing each other deliver the best performance in persuasion. In addition, the result of the detailed analysis suggests that expressing the same attitudes among the agents toward the user delivers a better performance in persuasion than expressing the different attitudes among them.