Abstract

Research on resource-bounded agents has established that rational agents need to be able to revise their commitments in the light of new opportunities. In the context of collaborative activities, rational agents must be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other conflicting intentions. The SPIRE experimental system allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. Prior work with SPIRE examined the effect of team norms, environmental factors, and agent utility functions on individual and group outcomes for homogeneous groups of agents. This paper extends these results to situations involving heterogeneous groups in which agents use different utility functions. The paper provides new illustrations of the ways in which SPIRE can reveal unpredicted interactions among the variables involved, and it suggests preliminary principles for designers of collaborative agents.

Highlights

  • Computer systems increasingly are elements of complex, distributed environments in which human and computer agents interact

  • This paper focuses on the decision making that self-interested, collaborative agents must perform when their commitment to a group activity conflicts with opportunities to commit to different actions or plans

  • We present the results of experiments using the SPIRE simulation system, an experimental framework that allows us to simulate and study this type of intention reconciliation by collaborative agents

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Summary

Introduction

Computer systems increasingly are elements of complex, distributed environments in which human and computer agents interact. This paper focuses on the decision making that self-interested, collaborative agents must perform when their commitment to a group activity conflicts with opportunities to commit to different actions or plans. Research on rationality and resource-bounded reasoning [4, 10, inter alia] has established the need for agents to dynamically adapt their plans to accommodate new opportunities and changes in the environment; sometimes, commitments need to be dropped Efforts in this area have mainly focused on plan management and evolution in the context of individual plans. The SPIRE simulation system allows us to study the impact of environmental factors, social-commitment policies, and agent utility functions on individual and group outcomes.

Current and future expected income
Estimating the loss in next week’s income
Non-monetary factor: brownie points
Combining the factors
Experimental results
Heterogeneity in the weight given to FEI
Heterogeneity in social consciousness
Effect of the number of outside offers
Related Work
Conclusions
Full Text
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