Power in normative systems

  • Authors:

  • Thomas Ågotnes;Wiebe van der Hoek;Moshe Tennenholtz;Michael Wooldridge

  • Affiliations:

  • Bergen University College, Bergen, Norway;University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK;Israel Institute of Technology, Israel;University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of The 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems - Volume 1
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Power indices such as the Banzhaf index were originally developed within voting theory in an attempt to rigorously characterise the influence that a voter is able to wield in a particular voting game. In this paper, we show how such power indices can be applied to understanding the relative importance of agents when we attempt to devise a coordination mechanism using the paradigm of social laws, or normative systems. Understanding how pivotal an agent is with respect to the success of a particular social law is of benefit when designing such social laws: we might typically aim to ensure that power is distributed evenly amongst the agents in a system, to avoid bottlenecks or single points of failure. After formally defining the framework and illustrating the role of power indices in it, we investigate the complexity of computing these indices, showing that the characteristic complexity result is #P-completeness. We then investigate cases where computing indices is computationally easy.