TY - GEN
T1 - Building coalitions involving agents and humans
T2 - 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS'07
AU - Guyot, Paul
AU - Honiden, Shinichi
PY - 2007/12/1
Y1 - 2007/12/1
N2 - Agent-based participatory simulations are laboratory experiments designed like agent-based simulations and where humans access the simulation as software agents. This paper describes the outcomes of six experiments lasting up to two hours each, where human players took part in an iterated game derived from the El Farol bar problem. Agents decide synchronously to go to the bar or to stay home and the benefit depends on the bar attendance, with a threshold effect: it is better to stay home if more than 60% of the agents go. Contrasting with the original version of this problem, we allowed agents, and therefore humans, to communicate before they took their decision. The first two experiments allowed us to train participants and to introduce the notion of teams. Teams represented coalitions within the game and positively affected scoring, but they were not part of an obvious solution to the problem and they did not enforce cooperative behavior in the game. Drawing from these experiments, we designed autonomous agents reproducing strategies of the participants. These agents took part in the last four participatory experiments and we observed the formation of coalitions between agents, between humans and between agents and humans.
AB - Agent-based participatory simulations are laboratory experiments designed like agent-based simulations and where humans access the simulation as software agents. This paper describes the outcomes of six experiments lasting up to two hours each, where human players took part in an iterated game derived from the El Farol bar problem. Agents decide synchronously to go to the bar or to stay home and the benefit depends on the bar attendance, with a threshold effect: it is better to stay home if more than 60% of the agents go. Contrasting with the original version of this problem, we allowed agents, and therefore humans, to communicate before they took their decision. The first two experiments allowed us to train participants and to introduce the notion of teams. Teams represented coalitions within the game and positively affected scoring, but they were not part of an obvious solution to the problem and they did not enforce cooperative behavior in the game. Drawing from these experiments, we designed autonomous agents reproducing strategies of the participants. These agents took part in the last four participatory experiments and we observed the formation of coalitions between agents, between humans and between agents and humans.
KW - Agent-based simulations
KW - Coalition formation
KW - El Farol bar problem
KW - Participatory simulations
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=60349130957&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=60349130957&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1329125.1329379
DO - 10.1145/1329125.1329379
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:60349130957
SN - 9788190426275
T3 - Proceedings of the International Conference on Autonomous Agents
SP - 1257
EP - 1259
BT - AAMAS'07 - Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
Y2 - 14 May 2008 through 18 May 2008
ER -