Managing social influences through argumentation-based negotiation

ABSTRACT

Social influences play an important part in the actions that an individual agent may perform within a multi-agent society. However, the incomplete knowledge and the diverse and conflicting influences present within such societies, may stop an agent from abiding by all its social influences. This may, in turn, lead to conflicts that the agents need to identify, manage, and resolve in order for the society to behave in a coherent manner. To this end, we present an empirical study of an argumentation-based negotiation (ABN) approach that allows the agents to detect such conflicts, and then manage and resolve them through the use of argumentative dialogues. To test our theory, we map our ABN model to a multi-agent task allocation scenario. Our results show that using an argumentation approach allows agents to both efficiently and effectively manage their social influences even under high degrees of incompleteness. Finally, we show that allowing agents to argue and resolve such conflicts early in the negotiation encounter increases their efficiency in managing social influences.

REFERENCES

• 1: C. Castelfranchi. Commitments: From individual intentions to groups and organizations. In Proc. of ICMAS'95, pages 41--48, San Francisco, CA, 1995.
• 2: N. C. Karunatillake and N. R. Jennings. Is it worth arguing? In Argumentation in Multi-Agent Systems, LNAI 3366, pages 234--250, NY, USA, 2004.
• 3: N. C. Karunatillake, N. R. Jennings, I. Rahwan, and T. J. Norman. Arguing and negotiating in the presence of social influences. In Proc. of CEEMAS'05, LNAI 3690, pages 223--235, Budapest, Hungary, 2005.
• 4: Nishan C. Karunatillake , Nicholas R. Jennings , Iyad Rahwan , Timothy J. Norman, Argument-based negotiation in a social context, Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, July 25-29, 2005, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1082473.1082758]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
        I.2.11 Distributed Artificial Intelligence

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Theory

Keywords:
argumentation-based negotiation, conflict resolution