Experimental Comparison of Rational Choice Theory, Norm and Rights Based Multi Agent Systems

Abstract

As utility calculus cannot account for an important part of agents’ behaviour in Multi-Agent Systems, researchers have progressively adopted a more normative approach. Unfortunately, social laws have turned out to be too restrictive in real-life domains where autonomous agents’ activity cannot be completely specified in advance. The idea of Rights is a halfway concept between anarchic and off-line constrained interaction. Rights improve coordination and facilitate social action in Multi-Agent domains, they allow agents enough freedom, and at the same time constrain them (prohibiting specific actions). So far rights have not been tested or proven experimentally. We are comparing experimentally the three mentioned interaction architectures in the domain of agent-based traffic simulation.