Page 271 - Socially Intelligent Agents Creating Relationships with Computers and Robots

254 Socially Intelligent Agents

2.2 Selection of negotiating partners

Agents could have any of a wide variety of strategies for the identification
of issues about which to negotiate and for the selection of negotiating partners.
At one extreme, an agent could identify an issue and then negotiate with every
possible (or known) agent concerning that issue. At the other extreme, agents
can select other agents with which to negotiate and determine the issues in
collaboration with the selected agents. The strategy to be modelled - whether
one of these extreme cases or some combination or set of parallel strategies -
should depend on observation and the evidence of domain expertise.
In the model reported here, the negotiating strategy was driven by the selec-
tion of agents as negotiating partners. The criteria for selecting an agent with
which to negotiation were based on trustworthiness, reliability, similarity, help-
fulness, acquaintanceship, untrustworthiness, unreliability, unhelpfulness. One
agent identifies another as reliable if the other agent responds affirmatively to a
suggestion that the two agents negotiate. An agent will identify another as trust-
worthy if its public negotiating position reflects previous agreements between
the two agents. An agent is helpful if it suggests to two or more other agents
that they might usefully negotiate with one another and agreement among those
agents is realised. An agent will identify another as similar if, among all of
the negotiating positions known to the agent, the other agent shares the largest
number of position values. One agent can know another either because of an
approach at random or because the other agent has made contact by suggesting
a negotiation.
Each agent in the model has rules for attaching endorsements - tokens re-
flecting the selection or aversion criteria - to other agents. The ranking of the
importance of endorsements is, in the first instance, random except that opposite
endorsements (helpful and unhelpful, trustworthy and untrustworthy, reliable
and unreliable) have rankings of the same magnitude and opposite sign. So
that if trustworthy is the most important positive endorsement, untrustworthy
will be the most important negative endorsement. Each agent will have its own
initial ranking of positive (and therefore negative) endorsements. Each agent
will select the best endorsed agent it knows as a negotiating partner at each
stage.
Over the course of a negotiation process, each agent will continue to learn
about other agents - a process represented by the ongoing attachment of en-
dorsements. Each agent also learns which are the most important criteria to
use in selecting negotiating partners. If the use of a particular set of rankings
of criteria leads to agreement with a selected agent or group of agents, there
is no reason to change the relative importance of the different criteria. If no
agreement is reached, then there will be less confidence in the current ranking -