Toward Agent-based Large-scale Decision Support System: The Effect of Facilitators

Good discussions are essential for group decisions, especially when a group has many people. Providing good support is critical for establishing and maintaining coherent discussions that avoid such anti-social behaviors as flaming, which has been observed in some large discussion groups. We have developed a large-scale online decision support system that has facilitator support functions and deployed it in case studies for several real-world online discussion supports. In this paper, we propose a facilitator-mediated online discussion model to lead discussions in a better direction to reach decisions. Our ultimate goal is an automated facilitator agent that can help participants reach reasonable decisions. In reality, online discussion is often plagued by "flaming," which is posting or sending offensive messages during a discussion. Such flaming phenomena have been focused on as antisocial behavior in online discussion forums. After several cases studies, we learned several lessons. Critically, in all of our social experiments, no flaming has been observed in our facilitator-mediated decision support system. Our insights also suggest that the social presence of a facilitator would greatly affect participant behavior.