Abstract
Coordination in open multi-agent systems (MAS) can reduce costs to agents associated with conflicting goals and actions, allowing artificial societies to attain higher levels of aggregate utility. Techniques for increasing coordination typically involve incorporating notions of conventions, namely socially adopted standards of behaviour, at either an agent or system level. As system designers cannot necessarily create high quality conventions a priori, we require an understanding of how agents can dynamically generate, adopt and adapt conventions during their normal interaction processes. Many open MAS domains, such as peer-to-peer and mobile ad-hoc networks, exhibit properties that restrict the application of the mechanisms that are often used, especially those requiring the incorporation of additional components at an agent or society level. In this paper, we use Influencer Agents (IAs) to manipulate convention emergence, which we define as agents with strategies and goals chosen to aid the emergence of high quality conventions in domains characterised by heterogeneous ownership and uniform levels of agent authority. Using the language coordination problem (Steels in Artif Life 2(3):319–392, 1995), we evaluate the effect of IAs on convention emergence in a population. We show that relatively low proportions of IAs can (i) effectively manipulate the emergence of high-quality conventions, and (ii) increase convention adoption and quality. We make no assumptions involving agent mechanism design or internal architecture beyond the usual assumption of rationality. Our results demonstrate the fragility of convention emergence in the presence of malicious or faulty agents that attempt to propagate low quality conventions, and confirm the importance of social network structure in convention adoption.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Albert R., Barabási A. L. (2002) Statistical mechanics of complex networks. Reviews of Modern Physics 74: 47–97
Agotnes T., Vander Hoek W., Wooldridge M. (2009) Robust normative systems and a logic of norm compliance. Logic Journal of IGPL 18(1): 4–30. doi:10.1093/jigpal/jzp070.
Arthur W. (1994) Inductive reasoning and bounded rationality. The American Economic Review 84(2): 406–411
Axelrod R. (1986) An evolutionary approach to norms. The American Political Science Review 80(4): 1095–1111
Barabási A. L., Albert R. (1999) Emergence of scaling in random networks. Science 286(5439): 509
Boman M. (1999) Norms in artificial decision making. Artificial Intelligence and Law 7(1): 17–35
Chen, W., Wang, Y., & Yang, S. (2009). Efficient influence maximization in social networks. In Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 199–208).
Dellarocas, C., & Klein, M. (1999). Civil agent societies: Tools for inventing open agent-mediated electronic marketplaces. In Proceedings of the ACM conference on electronic commerce (pp. 24–39).
Eppstein, D., & Wang, J. (2002). A steady state model for graph power laws. In 2nd international workshop on web dynamics.
Galan J., Izquierdo L. (2005) Appearances can be deceiving: Lessons learned re-implementing Axelrod’s evolutionary approach to norms. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 8(3): 108–111
Garlick, M., & Chli, M. (2009). The effect of social influence and curfews on civil violence. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 1335–1336).
Gonzalez M., Lind P., Hermann H. (2006) Networks based on collisions between mobile agents. Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena 224(2–4): 137–148
Griffiths, N., & Luck, M. (2010). Changing neighbours: Improving tag-based cooperation. In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (pp. 249–256).
Grizard, A., Vercouter, L., Stratulat, T., & Muller, G. (2007). A peer-to-peer normative system to achieve social order. In Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in agent systems II (Vol. 4386, pp. 274–289). Springer.
Huynh T., Jennings N., Shadbolt N. (2006) An integrated trust and reputation model for open multi-agent systems. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 13(2): 119–154. doi:10.1007/s10458-005-6825-4.
Jennings N. (1993) Commitments and conventions: The foundation of coordination in multi-agent systems. The Knowledge Engineering Review 8(3): 223–250
Kempe, D., & Kleinberg, J. (2003). Maximizing the spread of influence through a social network. In Proceedings of the 9th ACM international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining (pp. 137–146).
Kittock J. (2002) Emergence of social conventions in complex networks. Artificial Intelligence 141(1–2): 171–185. doi:10.1016/S0004-3702(02)00262-X.
Kleinberg J. (2000) Navigation in a small world. Nature 406(3): 845
Mahmoud, S., Griffiths, N., Keppens, J., & Luck, M. (2010). The role of mutation in norm emergence. In Proceedings of the 5th international workshop on normative multi-agent systems (pp. 23–28).
Modgil, S., Faci, N., Meneguzzi, F., Oren, N., Miles, S., & Luck, M. (2009). A framework for monitoring agent-based normative systems. In Proceedings of the 8th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 153–160).
Morales, J., López-Sánchez, M., & Esteva, M. (2011). Using experience to generate new regulations. In Proceedings of the 22nd international joint conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 307–312).
Mukherjee, P., Sen, S., & Airiau, S. (2008). Norm emergence under constrained interactions in diverse societies. In Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on autonomous agents and multi-agent systems (pp. 779–786).
Oh, J., & Smith, S. (2008). A few good agents: multi-agent social learning. In Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 339–346).
Oliver P. (1980) Rewards and punishments as selective incentives for collective action: Theoretical investigations. American Journal of Sociology 85(6): 1356–1375
Page S. (1997) On incentives and updating in agent based models. Computational Economics 10(1): 67–87
Perreau de Pinninck Bas A., Sierra C., Schorlemmer M. (2009) A multiagent network for peer norm enforcement. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 21(3): 397–424. doi:10.1007/s10458-009-9107-8.
Pirzada A. A., Mcdonald C. (2006) Trust establishment in pure ad-hoc networks. Wireless Personal Communications 37(1–2): 139–168. doi:10.1007/s11277-006-1574-5.
Sabater-Mir J., Paolucci M., Conte R. (2006) Repage: Reputation and image among limited autonomous partners. Journal of Artificial Societies and Social Simulation 9: 2
Salazar N., Rodriguez-Aguilar J. A., Arcos J. (2010) Robust coordination in large convention spaces. AI Communications 23(4): 357–372
Salazar, N., Rodriguez-Aguilar, J. A., & Arcos, J. L. (2010). Convention emergence through spreading mechanisms. In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (Vol. 1, pp. 1431–1432).
Salazar, N., Rodriguez-aguilar, J. A., & Arcos, J. L. (2010). Robust coordination through spreading mechanisms. Technical Report IIIA-TR-2010-10, Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, Spanish National Research Council.
Salazar, N., Rodriguez-aguilar, J. A., & Arcos, J. L. (2008). Infection-based self-configuration in agent societies. In Proceedings of the 2008 conference companion on genetic and evolutionary computation (pp. 1945–1951).
Savarimuthu, B., Cranefield, S., & Purvis, M. (2007). Norm emergence in agent societies formed by dynamically changing networks. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on intelligent agent technology (pp. 464–470). doi:10.1109/IAT.2007.76.
Sen, S., & Airiau, S. (2007). Emergence of norms through social learning. In Proceedings of the twentieth international joint conference on artificial intelligence (pp. 1507–1512).
Sethi, R., & Somanathan, E. (2005). Norm compliance and strong reciprocity. In Moral sentiments and material interests: The foundations of cooperation in economic life (pp. 229–250). Cambridge: MIT Press.
Shoham Y., Tennenholtz M. (1997) On the emergence of social conventions: Modeling, analysis, and simulations. Artificial Intelligence 94(1–2): 139–166. doi:10.1016/S0004-3702(97)00028-3.
Singh, M. (2000). A social semantics for agent communication languages. In Issues in agent communication (pp. 31–45). Berlin: Springer.
Sommerfeld R. D., Krambeck H. J., Semmann D., Milinski M. (2007) Gossip as an alternative for direct observation in games of indirect reciprocity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 104(44): 17435–17440. doi:10.1073/pnas.0704598104.
Steels L. (1995) A self-organizing spatial vocabulary. Artificial Life 2(3): 319–392
Szabó G., Fath G. (2007) Evolutionary games on graphs. Physics Reports 446(4–6): 97–216
Vogiatzis, G., MacGillivray, I., & Chli, M. (2010). A probabilistic model for trust and reputation. In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (pp. 225–232).
Walker, A., & Wooldridge, M. (1995). Understanding the emergence of conventions in multi-agent systems. In Proceedings of the 1st international conference on multi-agent systems (pp. 384–389).
Yu, C., Werfel, J., & Nagpal, R. (2010). Collective decision-making in multi-agent systems by implicit leadership. In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems, Richland, SC (pp 1189–1196).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Franks, H., Griffiths, N. & Jhumka, A. Manipulating convention emergence using influencer agents. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 26, 315–353 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-012-9193-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-012-9193-x