Building and using social structures: A case study using the agent ART testbed

  • Authors:
  • Elisabetta Erriquez;Wiebe van der Hoek;Michael Wooldridge

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Liverpool, United Kingdom;University of Liverpool, United Kingdom;University of Liverpool, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST) - Special section on agent communication, trust in multiagent systems, intelligent tutoring and coaching systems
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

This article investigates the conjecture that agents who make decisions in scenarios where trust is important can benefit from the use of a social structure, representing the social relationships that exist between agents. We propose techniques that can be used by agents to initially build and then progressively update such a structure in the light of experience. We describe an implementation of our techniques in the domain of the Agent ART testbed: we take two existing agents for this domain (“Simplet” and “Connected”) and compare their performance with versions that use our social structure (“SocialSimplet” and “SocialConnected”). We show that SocialSimplet and SocialConnected outperform their counterparts with respect to the quality of the interactions, the number of rounds won in a competition, and the total utility gained.