Multiagent Collaborative Search with Self-Interested Agents

Ryuki Shimoji and Chiaki Sakama

Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Intelligent Agent Technology (IAT'15), 2015.

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental study on collaborative search by distributed autonomous agents. We consider a problem such that multiple agents search for target objects in a field, and communicate with each other to exchange information of objects. Agents have six different strategies: cooperative, skeptical, free rider, liar, skeptical liar and solitary. These strategies characterize behaviors of agents for transmitting/receiving information in different ways. We observe the effect of self-interested agents who act non-cooperatively or even act deceptively to increase their own profits. We identify situations in which self-interested agents have advantages and investigate conditions which are effective to suppress the development of self-interested agents.

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