Risk Tolerance and Social Awareness: Adapting Deterrence Sanctions to Agent Populations

Normative environments for multi-agent systems provide means to monitor and enforce agents' compliance to their commitments. However, when the normative space is imperfect, contracts to which norms apply may be Unbalanced, and agents may exploit potential flaws to their own advantage. In this paper we analyze how a normative framework endowed with a simple adaptive deterrence sanctioning model responds to different agent populations. Agents are characterized by their risk tolerance and by their social attitude. We show that risk-averse or socially concerned populations cause lesser deterrence sanctions to be imposed by the normative system

Implementation and Performance issues in Collaborative Optimization

Nomenclature Introduction Robert Braun, Peter Gage, Ilan Kroo, Ian Sobieski IMPLEMENTATION AND PERFORMANCE ISSUES IN COLLABORATIVE OPTIMIZATION Aerospace Engineer, NASA-LaRC, Member AIAA Lecturer, Australian Defense Academy, Member AIAA Assoc. Professor,Stanford University, Member AIAA Graduate Student, Stanford University, Member AIAA Copyright c 1996 by Ian Sobieski. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc. with permission. Collaborative optimization is a multidisciplinary design architecture that is well-suited to large-scale multidisciplinary optimization problems. This paper compares this approach with other architectures, examines the details of the formulation, and some aspects of its performance. A particular version of the architecture is proposed to better accommodate the occurrence of multiple feasible regions. The use of system level inequality constraints is shown to increase the convergence rate. A series of simple test problems, demons..

Policy Stable States in the Graph Model for Conflict Resolution

A new approach to policy analysis is formulated within the framework of the graph model for conflict resolution. A policy is defined as a plan of action for a decision maker (DM) that specifies the DM’s intended action starting at every possible state in a graph model of a conflict. Given a profile of policies, a Policy Stable State (PSS) is a state that no DM moves away from (according to its policy), and such that no DM would prefer to change its policy given the policies of the other DMs. The profile of policies associated to a PSS is called a Policy Equilibrium. Properties of PSSs are developed, and a refinement is suggested that restricts DMs to policies that are credible in that they are in the DM’s immediate interest. Relationships with existing stability definitions in the graph model for conflict resolution are then explored. Copyright Springer 2004Game equilibrium, graph model, policy equilibrium, policy stable state, strategic conflict,