Research on resource-bounded agents has established that rational agents need to be able to revise their commitments in light of new opportunities. In the context of collaborative activities, rational agents must be able to reconcile their intentions to do team-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. The SPIRE experimental system allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied. Initial work with SPIRE examined the impact of environmental factors and agent utility functions on individual and group outcomes in the context of one set of social norms governing collaboration. This paper extends those results by further studying the effect of environmental factors and the agents'level of social consciousness and by comparing the impact of two different types of social norms on agent behavior and outcomes. The results show that agents operating under both sets of norms respond similarly to varying environmental factors, but that th...
Barbara J. Grosz, Sarit Kraus, David G. Sullivan,