Engineering Commons^™

Social Utility Functions-Part Ii: Applications, Wynn C. Stirling, Richard L. Frost

Faculty Publications

Social utilities account for agent preferences and, thus, can characterize complex interrelationships, such as cooperation, compromise, negotiation, and altruism, that can exist between agents. Satisficing game theory, which is based on social utilities, offers a framework within which to design sophisticated multiagent systems. Key features of this approach are: a) an N-agent system may be represented by a 2N-dimensional Bayesian network, called a praxeic network; b) the theory accommodates a notion of situational altruism (a willingness to defer to others in a controlled way if so doing would actually benefit others under the condition that others wish to take advantage …