M. Kurosu (Ed.): Human-Computer Interaction, Part II, HCII 2013, LNCS 8005, pp. 266–275, 2013. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 A Cross-Cultural Study of Playing Simple Economic Games Online with Humans and Virtual Humans Elnaz Nouri and David Traum {nouri,traum}@ict.usc.edu Abstract. We compare the simple online economic interactions between a human and a multimodal communication agent (virtual human) to the findings of similar simple interactions with other humans and those that were run in the laboratory. We developed protocols and dialogue capabilities to support the multi modal agent in playing two well-studied economic games (Ultimatum Game, Dictator Game). We analyze the interactions based on the outcome and self-reported values of possible factors involved in the decision making. We compare these parameters across two games, and the two cultures of US and India. Our results show that humans’ interaction with a virtual human is similar to when they are playing with another human and the majority of the people choose to allocate about half of the stakes to the virtual human, just as they would with another human. There are, however, some significant differences between offer distributions and value reports for different conditions (game, opponent, and culture of participant). Keywords: Culture, Values, Decision Making, Virtual Human, Economic Games, Communicative Agents. 1 Introduction In this paper we present a cross-cultural study of online negotiation in simple economic games, where participants play opposite either a virtual human or someone from their own culture. Economic models of rational behavior typically assume that people try to maximize their own profit in such games[15]. However, in social settings, including these games, previous research has found that people from most cultures take other factors into account as well, such as relative gain (cast as competition or fairness), gain of the other, and joint gain[17]. Online interaction represents an intermediate point between normal social interaction, and individual performance[6]. The participants are alone, acting on a computer interface, however, the situation is still posed as a social interaction: playing with either another person from their culture, or with a virtual human: an animated character who engages in spoken dialogue and non-verbal communicative behavior. We are interested in whether people playing under these conditions act similarly to those playing face in laboratory settings and with other humans. We are looking at both the game play and participants’ self-report of what values they are concerned with when making moves.