Digital Library of the European Council for Modelling and Simulation

Title:	Decision Making By Intelligent Agents In Unfamiliar Settings: The Role Of Team Communication
Authors:	Frigotto Laura, Rossi Alessandro
Published in:	ECMS 2007 Proceedings Edited by: Ivan Zelinka, Zuzana Oplatkova, Alessandra Orsoni ISBN: 978-0-9553018-2-7 Doi: 10.7148/2007 21^st European Conference on Modelling and Simulation, Prague, June 4-6, 2007
Citation format:	Frigotto, M. L., & Rossi, A. (2007). Decision Making By Intelligent Agents In Unfamiliar Settings: The Role Of Team Communication. ECMS 2007 Proceedings edited by: I. Zelinka, Z. Oplatkova, A. Orsoni (pp. 134-139). European Council for Modeling and Simulation. doi:10.7148/2007-0134
DOI:	http://dx.doi.org/10.7148/2007-0134
Abstract:	We model individual decision making in unfamiliar settings using constraint satisfaction networks. We investigate to what extent team communication might overcome the limits of partially informed and heterogeneous agents, allowing them to improve their choices in dyadic decision making settings (in terms of compatibility with the choices that they would undertake if fully informed). We show that communication has a non-monotonic effect: while initial increases in communication strength result in better performance, when one exceeds an optimal degree, performance declines up to a point in which independent agents perform better than agents communicating in teams. We show that this is largely due to the fact that too much communication confuses agents, blocking the process of sorting alternatives out. Similar considerations on non-monotonicity still holds if we substitute independent choice under communication with group choice based on voting. However, the latter rule, compared to the former one, shows lower performance for all communication strengths.
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