Abstract
A multiagent system may be regarded as an artificial society of autonomous software agents. Welfare economics provides formal models of how the distribution of resources amongst the members of a society affects the well-being of that society as a whole. In multiagent systems research, the concept of social welfare is usually given a utilitarian interpretation, i.e. whatever increases the average welfare of the agents inhabiting a society is taken to be beneficial for society as well. While this is indeed appropriate for a wide range of applications, we believe that it is worthwhile to also consider some of the other social welfare orderings that have been studied in the social sciences. In this paper, we put forward an engineering approach to welfare economics in multiagent systems by investigating the following question: Given a particular social welfare ordering appropriate for some application domain, how can we design practical criteria that will allow agents to decide locally whether or not a proposed deal would further social welfare with respect to that ordering? In particular, we review previous results on negotiating Pareto optimal allocations of resources as well as allocations that maximise egalitarian social welfare under this general perspective. We also provide new results on negotiating Lorenz optimal allocations, which may be regarded as a compromise between the utilitarian and the egalitarian approaches. Finally, we briefly discuss elitist agent societies, where social welfare is tied to the welfare of the most successful agent, as well as the notion of envy-freeness.
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
Sandholm, T.W.: Distributed Rational Decision Making. In: Weiss, G. (ed.) Multiagent Systems: A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, pp. 201–258. MIT Press, Cambridge (1999)
Grosz, B.J., Kraus, S.: Collaborative Plans for Complex Group Action. Artificial Intelligence 86, 269–357 (1996)
Lemaître, M., Verfaillie, G., Bataille, N.: Exploiting a Common Property Resource under a Fairness Constraint: A Case Study. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pp. 206–211. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, San Francisco (1999)
Harsanyi, J.C.: Can the Maximin Principle Serve as a Basis for Morality? American Political Science Review 69, 594–609 (1975)
Rawls, J.: A Theory of Justice. Oxford University Press, Oxford (1971)
Sen, A.K.: Collective Choice and Social Welfare. Holden Day (1970)
Arrow, K.J.: Social Choice and Individual Values. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester (1963)
Moulin, H.: Axioms of Cooperative Decision Making. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1988)
Kersten, G.E., Noronha, S.J., Teich, J.: Are All E-Commerce Negotiations Auctions? In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on the Design of Cooperative Systems (2000)
Endriss, U., Maudet, N., Sadri, F., Toni, F.: On Optimal Outcomes of Negotiations over Resources. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pp. 177–184. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Endriss, U., Maudet, N., Sadri, F., Toni, F.: Resource Allocation in Egalitarian Agent Societies. In: Secondes Journées Francophones sur les Modèles Formels d’Interaction. Cépaduès-Éditions, pp. 101–110 (2003)
Sandholm, T.W.: Contract Types for Satisficing Task Allocation: I Theoretical Results. In: AAAI Spring Symposium: Satisficing Models (1998)
Brams, S.J., Taylor, A.D.: Fair Division: From Cake-cutting to Dispute Resolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1996)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Endriss, U., Maudet, N. (2004). Welfare Engineering in Multiagent Systems. In: Omicini, A., Petta, P., Pitt, J. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World IV. ESAW 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 3071. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25946-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-25946-6_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-22231-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-25946-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive