Exploiting Social Reasoning to Deal with Agency Level Inconsistency

In a previous work [?], we presented the fundamental concepts of a social reasoning mechanism, which enables an agent to reason about the others using information about their goals, actions, resources and plans. In this paper we first place ourselves as an external observer to analyse the possible coupled outcomes of the social reasoning mechanisms of two different agents. We show that in some particular cases, different inferred dependence situations imply that the agents’ mutual representations are inconsistent at an agency level. Then, we detail our analysis in a particular case where the agents have the same plans (and believe in that), showing that some particular coupled outcomes can be explained either by incompleteness or incorrectness of mutual representation. In order to do that, we extend our previous model by introducing the notion of goal situation. Finally, we conclude by showing that these properties may be detected by the agents themselves if we supply them with an internal mechanism which enables them to manipulate the outcomes inferred both by their own social reasoning mechanism and by those of the others, whenever these latter are obtained by communication.