Title
Destabilising Conventions: Characterising the Cost
Abstract
Conventions are often used in multi-agent systems to achieve coordination amongst agents without creating additional system requirements. Encouraging the emergence of robust conventions via fixed strategy agents is one of the main methods of manipulating how conventions emerge. In this paper we demonstrate that fixed strategy agents can also be used to destabilise and remove established conventions. We examine the minimum level of intervention required to cause destabilisation, and explore the effect of different pricing mechanisms on the cost of interventions. We show that there is an inverse relationship between cost and the number of fixed strategy agents used. Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of placing fixed strategy agents by their cost, for different pricing mechanisms, as a mechanism for causing destabilisation. We show that doing so produces comparable results to placing by known metrics.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/SASO.2014.26
Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems
Keywords
Field
DocType
multi-agent systems,pricing,convention destabilization,cost characterization,fixed strategy agents,multiagent systems,pricing mechanisms,conventions,cost,destabilisation,emergence,norms,social influence
Computer science,Network topology,Social influence,System requirements,Distributed computing
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1949-3673
3
0.54
References 
Authors
15
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
James Marchant1142.57
Nathan Griffiths211515.49
Matthew Leeke37510.26