Reasoning About Opportunistic Propensity in Multi-agent Systems

Abstract

Opportunism is a behavior that takes advantage of knowledge asymmetry and results in promoting agents’ own value and demoting others’ value. We want to eliminate such selfish behavior in multi-agent systems, as it has undesirable results for the participating agents. In order for monitoring and eliminating mechanisms to be put in place, it is needed to know in which context agents will or are likely to perform opportunistic behavior. In this paper, we develop a framework to reason about agents’ opportunistic propensity. Opportunistic propensity refers to the potential for an agent to perform opportunistic behavior. In particular, agents in the system are assumed to have their own value systems and knowledge. With value systems, we define agents’ state preferences. Based on their value systems and incomplete knowledge about the state, they choose one of their rational alternatives, which might be opportunistic behavior. We then characterize the situations where agents will or will not perform opportunistic behavior and prove the computational complexity of predicting opportunism.