Centralized regulation of social exchanges between personality-based agents

Abstract

This paper presents a centralized mechanism for solving the coordination problem of personality-based multiagent systems from the point of view of social exchanges. The agents may have different personality traits, which induce different attitudes towards both the regulation mechanism and the possible profits of social exchanges. A notion of exchange stability can be defined, and the connections between agents' personalities and deviations of social exchanges from the stability point can be established. The model supports a decision procedure based on Qualitative Interval Markov Decision Processes, that can solve the problem of keeping the stability of social exchanges, in spite of the different personality traits of the agents. The paper deals only with transparent agents (agents that allow the external access to their balances of exchange values), but we hint on the case of non-transparent agents. The model is analyzed theoretically and contextualized simulations are presented. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.