Optimal social laws

Social laws have proved to be a powerful and theoretically elegant framework for coordination in multi-agent systems. Most existing models of social laws assume that a designer is attempting to produce a set of constraints on agent behaviour which will ensure that some single overall desirable objective is achieved. However, this represents a gross simplification of the typical situation, where a designer may have multiple (possibly conflicting) objectives, with different priorities. Moreover, social laws, as well as bringing benefits, also have implementation costs: imposing a social law often cannot be done at zero cost. We present a model of social laws that reflects this reality: it takes into account both the fact that the designer of a social law may have multiple differently valued objectives, and that the implementation of a social law is not costneutral. In this setting, designing a social law becomes an optimisation problem, in which a designer must take into account both th...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Thomas Ågotnes, Michael Wooldridge
• Keywords: ATAL 2010, Designer, Intelligent Agents, Optimal Social Law, Social Laws