Article

Effect of referrals on convergence to satisficing distributions

Authors:

Sandip SenAuthors Info & Claims

AAMAS '05: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

Pages 347 - 354

https://doi.org/10.1145/1082473.1082526

Published: 25 July 2005 Publication History

Abstract

We investigate a framework where agents locate high-quality service providers by using referrals from peer agents. The performance of providers is measured by the satisfaction obtained by agents from using their services. Provider performance depends upon its intrinsic capability and upon its current load. We present an algorithm for selecting a service provider for a given task which includes mechanisms for deciding when and who to ask for a referral. This mechanism requires learning, over interactions, both the performance levels of different service providers, as well as the quality of referrals provided by other agents. We use a satisficing rather than an optimizing framework, where agents are content to receive service quality above a threshold. Agents have to learn the quality of others' referrals and the quality of providers to find satisficing providers. We compare the effectiveness of referral systems with or without deception with systems without referrals. We identify zones, based on an observed entropy metric, where using referrals is helpful in promoting fast convergence to satisficing distributions.

References

[1]

U. Endriss and N. Maudet. Welfare engineering in multiagent systems. In A. Omicini, P. Petta, and J. Pitt, editors, Engineering Societies in the Agents World IV, volume 3071 of LNAI, pages 93--106. Springer-Verlag, 2004. Postproceedings of ESAW-2003.

[2]

G. E. Kersten. NEGO - group decision support system. Information and Management, 8:237--246, 1985.

Digital Library

[3]

V. Lotfi, T. J. Stewart, and S. Zionts. An aspiration-level interactive model for multiple criteria decision making. Comput. Oper. Res., 19(7):671--681, 1992.

Digital Library

[4]

J. G. March and H. A. Simon. Organizations. John Wiley and Sons, New York, 1958.

[5]

D. W. McDonald. Recommending collaboration with social networks: a comparative evaluation. In CHI '03: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pages 593--600, New York, NY, USA, 2003. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[6]

H. Moulin. Axioms of cooperative decision making. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

[7]

M. H. MP Singh. Service-oriented computing: semantics, processes, agents. John Wiley & Sons, 2004.

[8]

S. K. Rustogi and M. P. Singh. Be patient and tolerate imprecision: How autonomous agents can coordinate effectively. In Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, pages 512--517, 1999.

Digital Library

[9]

A. Sen. Collective choice and social welfare. Holden Day, 1973.

[10]

S. Sen, N. Arora, and S. Roychowdhury. Effects of local information on group behavior. In Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Multiagent Systems, pages 322--329, Menlo Park, CA, 1996. AAAI Press.

[11]

S. Sen and N. Sajja. Robustness of reputation-based trust: boolean case. In AAMAS '02: Proceedings of the first international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, pages 288--293, New York, NY, USA, 2002. ACM Press.

Digital Library

[12]

S. Sen and N. Sajja. Selecting service providers based on reputation. In Proceedings of the AAAI-2002 Workshop on Multi-Agent Modeling and Simulation of Economic Systems, 2002.

Digital Library

[13]

S. Sen and N. Sajja. Selecting service providers from noisy reputations. In Proceedings of the Second Intenational Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 1114--1115, New York, NY, 2003. ACM Pres.

Digital Library

[14]

H. A. Simon. Models of Man. John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1957.

[15]

J. Stimpson, M. A. Goodrich, and L. C. Walters. Satisficing and learning cooperation in the prisoner's dilemma. In B. Nebel, editor, Proceedings of the seventeenth International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-01), pages 535--544, San Francisco, CA, Aug. 4--10 2001. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc.

Digital Library

[16]

M. Tennenholtz, Y. Shoham, and A. Schaerf. Adaptive load balancing: A study in multi-agent learning. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2:475--500, Nov 1995.

Digital Library

[17]

R. Tietz and O. Bartos. Balancing of aspiration levels as fairness principle in negotiations. Lecture note in Economics and Mathematical Systems 213, 1983.

[18]

H.-J. Weber. Theory of adaptation of aspiration levels in a bilateral decision setting. In Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, pages 582--91, 1976.

[19]

B. Yu and M. P. Singh. Searching social networks. In Proceedings of the Second Intenational Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, pages 65--72, New York, NY, 2003. ACM Pres.

Digital Library

[20]

B. Yu, M. Venkatraman, and M. Singh. An adaptive social network for information access: Theoretical and experimental results. Applied Artificial Intelligence, 17(1):21--38, January 2003.

Cited By

Savarimuthu BCranefield SPurvis MPurvis M(2013)Identifying prohibition norms in agent societiesArtificial Intelligence and Law10.1007/s10506-012-9126-721:1(1-46)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10506-012-9126-7
Savarimuthu BCranefield SPurvis MPurvis M(2011)Identifying Conditional Norms in Multi-agent SocietiesCoordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems VI10.1007/978-3-642-21268-0_16(285-302)Online publication date: 2011
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21268-0_16
Savarimuthu BCranefield SPurvis MPurvis M(2010)Identifying conditional norms in multi-agent societiesProceedings of the 6th international conference on Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in agent systems10.5555/2018118.2018137(285-302)Online publication date: 1-May-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2018118.2018137
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

Effect of referrals on convergence to satisficing distributions
1. Computing methodologies
  1. Artificial intelligence
    1. Distributed artificial intelligence
  2. Machine learning
    1. Learning settings

Recommendations

Effect of deceptive referrals on system stability
AAMAS '06: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

We study the problem of agents attempting to find quality service providers in a distributed environment. While referrals from other agents can be used to locate high-quality providers, referrers may be malicious and provide incorrect referrals to ...
Using inertia and referrals to facilitate satisficing distributions
IWDC'05: Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Distributed Computing

We study the problem of distributed, self-interested agents searching for high-quality service providers where the performance of a service provider depends on its work load. Agents use referrals from peers to locate satisfactory providers. While stable ...
Learning to use referrals to select satisficing service providers
WRAC'05: Proceedings of the Second international conference on Radical Agent Concepts: innovative Concepts for Autonomic and Agent-Based Systems

We investigate a formal framework where agents use referrals from other agents to locate high-quality service providers. Agents have common knowledge about providers which are able to provide these services. The performance of providers is measured by ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

AAMAS '05: Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems

July 2005

1407 pages

ISBN:1595930930

DOI:10.1145/1082473

Program Chairs:
Michal Pechoucek
Czech Republic
,
Donald Steiner
USA
,
Simon Thompson
UK

Copyright © 2005 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

SIGAI: ACM Special Interest Group on Artificial Intelligence

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 July 2005

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

AAMAS05

Sponsor:

SIGAI

AAMAS05: AAMAS '05 - Fourth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2005

July 25 - 29, 2005

The Netherlands

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

12
Total Citations
View Citations
203
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)0
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)0

Reflects downloads up to 05 Mar 2025

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Savarimuthu BCranefield SPurvis MPurvis M(2013)Identifying prohibition norms in agent societiesArtificial Intelligence and Law10.1007/s10506-012-9126-721:1(1-46)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2013
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s10506-012-9126-7
Savarimuthu BCranefield SPurvis MPurvis M(2011)Identifying Conditional Norms in Multi-agent SocietiesCoordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems VI10.1007/978-3-642-21268-0_16(285-302)Online publication date: 2011
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21268-0_16
Savarimuthu BCranefield SPurvis MPurvis M(2010)Identifying conditional norms in multi-agent societiesProceedings of the 6th international conference on Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in agent systems10.5555/2018118.2018137(285-302)Online publication date: 1-May-2010
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2018118.2018137
Porter JChakraborty KSen S(2009)Learning to locate trading partners in agent networksProceedings of the Second international conference on Adaptive and Learning Agents10.1007/978-3-642-11814-2_7(107-122)Online publication date: 12-May-2009
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-642-11814-2_7
Sankaranarayanan VChandrasekaran MUpadhyaya S(2007)Towards modeling trust based decisionsProceedings of the 12th European conference on Research in Computer Security10.5555/2393847.2393891(485-500)Online publication date: 24-Sep-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/2393847.2393891
Sen SSaha SAiriau SCandale TBanerjee DChakraborty DMukherjee PGursel A(2007)Robust agent communitiesProceedings of the 2nd international conference on Autonomous intelligent systems: agents and data mining10.5555/1772290.1772294(28-45)Online publication date: 3-Jun-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1772290.1772294
Porter JSen S(2007)Searching for Collaborators in Agent NetworksProceedings of the 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Workshops10.5555/1339264.1339631(508-511)Online publication date: 2-Nov-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/1339264.1339631
Durbach IHofmeyr JDurfee EYokoo MHuhns MShehory O(2007)Interactions between market barriers and communication networks in marketing systemsProceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems10.1145/1329125.1329196(1-8)Online publication date: 14-May-2007
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1329125.1329196
Porter JSen S(2007)Searching for Collaborators in Agent Networks2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conferences on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Workshops10.1109/WI-IATW.2007.113(508-511)Online publication date: Nov-2007
https://doi.org/10.1109/WI-IATW.2007.113
Sankaranarayanan VChandrasekaran MUpadhyaya S(2007)Towards Modeling Trust Based Decisions: A Game Theoretic ApproachComputer Security – ESORICS 200710.1007/978-3-540-74835-9_32(485-500)Online publication date: 2007
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-74835-9_32
Show More Cited By

View Options

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Figures

Tables

Media

View Table of Conten