Multi-goal economic search using dynamic search structures

This paper investigates cooperative search strategies for agents engaged in costly search in a complex environment. Searching cooperatively, several search goals can be satisfied within a single search effort. Given the searchers' preferences, the goal is to conduct a search in a way that the expected overall utility out of the set of opportunities found (e.g., products when operating in a market) minus the costs associated with finding that set is maximized. This search scheme, given in the context of a group search, applies also to scenarios where a single agent has to search for a set of items for satisfying several different goals. The uniqueness of the proposed mechanism is in the ability to partition the group of agents/goals into sub-groups where the search continues for each group autonomously. As we show throughout the paper, this strategy is favorable as it weakly dominates (i.e., can improve but never worsen) cooperative and autonomous search techniques. The paper prese...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: AAMAS
• Authors: David Sarne, Efrat Manisterski, Sarit Kraus
• Keywords: AAMAS 2010, Cooperative Search Strategies, Intelligent Agents, Optimal Search Strategy, Single Search Effort