Coordination with collective and individual decisions

Abstract

The response to a large-scale disaster, e.g. an earthquake or a terrorist incident, urges for low-cost policies that coordinate sequential decisions of multiple agents. Decisions range from collective (common good) to individual (self-interested) perspectives, intuitively shaping a two-layer decision model. However, current decision theoretic models are either purely collective or purely individual and seek optimal policies. We present a two-layer, collective versus individual (CvI) decision model and explore the tradeoff between cost reduction and loss of optimality while learning coordination skills. Experiments, in a partially observable domain, test our approach for learning a collective policy and results show near-optimal policies that exhibit coordinated behavior. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.