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. It seems that a halfway concept between anarchic and off-line constrained interaction is needed. We think that the concept of right suits this idea. Rights improve coordination and facilitate social action in multi-agent domains. Rights allow the agents enough freedom, and at the same time constrain them (prohibiting specific actions). Therefore, rights can be understood as the basic concept underneath open normative systems where the agents reason about the code they must abide by.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
E. Alonso. How individuals negotiate protocols. In Proc. ICMAS-98, pages 18–25, Los Alamitos, CA, 1998. IEEE Computer Science Press.
E. Alonso. Rights and coordination in multi-agent systems. In Proc. UKMAS-98, 1998.
E. Alonso. An individualistic approach to social action in Multi-Agent Systems. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 11:519–530, 1999.
N.P. Barry. An Introduction to Modern Political Theory. Macmillan, London, 1989.
P.M. Blau. Interaction: social exchange. In D.L. Sills, editor, The International Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, New York, 1968. Macmillan.
C. Castelfranchi. Commitments: from individual intentions to groups and organisations. In Proc. ICMAS-95, pages 41–48, Cambridge, MA, 1995. MIT Press.
C. Castelfranchi, M. Miceli, and A. Cesta. Dependence relations among autonomous agents. In E. Werner and Y. Demazeau, editors, Decentralized A.I. 3, Proc. MAAMAW-91, pages 215–227, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1992. Elsevier Science Publishers.
R. Conte, C. Castelfranchi, and F. Dignum. Autonomous norm-acceptance. In Muller J.P., M.P. Singh, and A. Rao, editors, Proc. ATAL-98, pages 319–333, Berlin, 1998. Springer-Verlag.
J. Hintikka. Knowledge and Belief. Cornell University Press, 1962.
N.R. Jennings. Commitments and conventions: The foundation of coordination in Multi-Agent Systems. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 8:223–250, 1993.
S. Kraus, J. Wilkenfeld, and J. Zlotkin. Multiagent negotiation under time constraints. Artificial Intelligence, 75:297–345, 1995.
C. Krogh. The rights of agents. In M.J. Wooldridge, J.P. Mulle, and M. Tambe, editors, Intelligent Agents II: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages:=20 Proc. IJCAI-95 Workshop, pages 1–16, Berlin, 1996. Springer-Verlag.
H.J. Levesque, P.R. Cohen, and H.T. Nunes. On acting together. In T. Dietterich and W. Swartout, editors, Proc. AAAI-90, pages 94–99, Cambridge, MA, 1990. MIT Press.
K. Nielsen and R.A. Shiner. New Essays on Contract Theory. Canadian Association for Publishing in Philosophy, 1977.
T.J. Norman, C. Sierra, and N.R. Jennings. Rights and commitment in multi-agent agreements. In Proc. ICMAS-98, pages 222–229, Los Alamitos, CA, 1998. IEEE Computer Society.
G.M.P. O’Hare and N.R. Jenning (Eds.). Foundations of Distributed Artificial Intelligence. John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1996.
R. Reiner. Arguments against the possibility of perfect rationality. Minds and Machines, 5:373–389, 1995.
J.S. Rosenschein and G. Zlotkin. Rules of Encounter. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994.
Y. Shoham and M. Tennenhlotz. On the synthesis of useful social laws for artificial agents societies. In Proc. AAAI-92, pages 276–281, Menlo Park, CA, 1992. AAAI Press.
J.S. Sichman, R. Conte, Y. Demazeau, and C. Castelfranchi. A social reasoning mechanism based on dependence networks. In A. Cohn, editor, Proc. ECAI-94, pages 173–177. John Wiley and Sons, 1994.
G. Simmel. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Free Press, New York, 1908.
G. Staniford. Multi-agent system design: using human societal metaphors and normative logic. In M.J. Wooldridge and N.R. Jennings, editors, Proc. ECAI-94 Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, pages 289–293, Berlin, 1994. Springer-Verlag.
K.P. Sycara. Multiagent Systems. AI Magazine, 19:79–92, 1998.
M. Tennenhlotz. On stable social laws and qualitative equilibria. Artificial Intelligence, 102:1–20, 1998.
A. Walker and M. Wooldridge. Understanding the emergence of conventions in multi-agent systems. In Proc. ICMAS-95, pages 384–389, Cambridge, MA, 1995. MIT Press.
G. Weiss. Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1999.
M. Wooldridge and N.R. Jennings. Towards a theory of cooperative problem solving. In J.W. Perram and J-P. Müller, editors, Proc. MAAMAW-94, Workshop on Distributed Software Agents and Applications, pages 40–53, Berlin, Germany, 1994. Springer-Verlag.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Alonso, E. (2002). Rights for Multi-agent Systems. In: d’Inverno, M., Luck, M., Fisher, M., Preist, C. (eds) Foundations and Applications of Multi-Agent Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2403. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45634-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45634-1_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-43962-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45634-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive