Vidal's library
Title: Stable Team Formation Among Self-Interested Agents
Author: Priyang Rathod and Marie des Jardins
Book Tittle: AAAI Workshop on Forming and Maintaing Coalitions in Adaptive Multiagent Systems
Year: 2004
Abstract: Autonomous agents in a multi-agent system must sometimes collaborate with other agents in order to perform complex tasks, regardless of whether they are inherently self-interested or cooperative. However, the nature of such a collaboration may vary in duration, from a single-task short-term coalition to a stable contractual alliance. The real world is replete with instances of both types of organizations. We present a multi-agent environment with self-interested agents whose aim is to perform tasks by forming simple teams with other agents. Team leaders recruit agents to join teams by proposing contracts that allocate various payoff shares to the team members. Contracts can be longterm (indefinite-length commitment with a buy-out penalty for leaving the team) or dynamic (commits the joining agent to the team only for a single task). We compare several alternative strategies for forming stable teams empirically and show that in the proposed environment, stable teams have greater organizational efficiency than dynamic teams. We also identify specific conditions and strategies for which stable teams have an advantage over dynamic ones.

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@InProceedings{rathod04a,
  author =	 {Priyang Rathod and Marie des Jardins},
  title =	 {Stable Team Formation Among Self-Interested Agents},
  booktitle =	 {{AAAI} Workshop on Forming and Maintaing Coalitions
                  in Adaptive Multiagent Systems},
  year =	 2004,
  abstract =	 {Autonomous agents in a multi-agent system must
                  sometimes collaborate with other agents in order to
                  perform complex tasks, regardless of whether they
                  are inherently self-interested or
                  cooperative. However, the nature of such a
                  collaboration may vary in duration, from a
                  single-task short-term coalition to a stable
                  contractual alliance. The real world is replete with
                  instances of both types of organizations. We present
                  a multi-agent environment with self-interested
                  agents whose aim is to perform tasks by forming
                  simple teams with other agents. Team leaders recruit
                  agents to join teams by proposing contracts that
                  allocate various payoff shares to the team
                  members. Contracts can be longterm
                  (indefinite-length commitment with a buy-out penalty
                  for leaving the team) or dynamic (commits the
                  joining agent to the team only for a single
                  task). We compare several alternative strategies for
                  forming stable teams empirically and show that in
                  the proposed environment, stable teams have greater
                  organizational efficiency than dynamic teams. We
                  also identify specific conditions and strategies for
                  which stable teams have an advantage over dynamic
                  ones.},
  keywords =     {multiagent coalitions},
  url = 	 {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/library/rathod04a.pdf},
  cluster = 	 {6617936971922011154}
}
Last modified: Wed Mar 9 10:16:16 EST 2011