Paper Info
Title
Coalition formation through motivation and trust
Abstract
Cooperation is the fundamental underpinning of multi-agent systems, allowing agents to interact to achieve their goals. Where agents are self-interested, or potentially unreliable, there must be appropriate mechanisms to cope with the uncertainty that arises. In particular, agents must manage the risk associated with interacting with others who have different objectives, or who may fail to fulfil their commitments. Previous work has utilised the notions of motivation and trust in engendering successful cooperation between self-interested agents. Motivations provide a means for representing and reasoning about agents' overall objectives, and trust offers a mechanism for modelling and reasoning about reliability, honesty, veracity and so forth. This paper extends that work to address some of its limitations. In particular, we introduce the concept of a clan: a group of agents who trust each other and have similar objectives. Clan members treat each other favourably when making private decisions about cooperation, in order to gain mutual benefit. We describe mechanisms for agents to form, maintain, and dissolve clans in accordance with their self-interested nature, along with giving details of how clan membership influences individual decision making. Finally, through some simulation experiments we illustrate the effectiveness of clan formation in addressing some of the inherent problems with cooperation among self-interested agents.
Year
DOI
Venue
2003
10.1145/860575.860579
AAMAS
Keywords
DocType
ISBN
coalition formation,different objective,successful cooperation,self-interested agent,fundamental underpinning,self-interested nature,clan member,appropriate mechanism,previous work,clan formation,clan membership,multi agent system,simulation experiment,clans,trust,motivation,cooperation
Conference
1-58113-683-8
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
43
3.16
12
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nathan Griffiths138834.25
Michael Luck23440275.97