An Optimal Contracting Strategy in a Digital Library

Agents can benefit from contracting some of their tasks that cannot be performedby themselves or that can be performed moreefficiently by other agents. Developing an agent's contracting strategy in the University of Michigan Digital Library (UMDL), however, is not easy for the following reasons. The UMDLconsists of self-interested agents who will perform a task of another agent's only whendoing it is their owninterests. In addition, multiple contracts take place concurrently such that other contracts currently in the system mayhave an impact on the success of one's owncontract. Therefore, an agent whohas a task (contractor) needs to modelwhat the other self-interested agents think and will do, and it also needsto consider the influence of other contracts onits contract. In this paper, wedefine the contractor's and the contractee's decision problems in the UMDL contracting situations, and present a contracting strategy by which a contractor can determine an opt...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1996
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Sunju Park, Edmund H. Durfee
• Keywords: AAAI 1996, Contracting, Contracting Strategy, Intelligent Agents, Self-interested Agents