Social Interactions of Autonomous Agents: Private and Global Views on Communication

In describing the interactions between agents we can take either a global view, where the set of all agents is seen as one big system, or a private view, where the system is identified with a single agent and the other agents form a part of the environment. Often a global view is taken to fix some protocols (like contract net) for all the possible social interactions between agents within the system. Privately the agents then have fixed reaction rules to respond to changes in the environment. In a sense the agents are no longer autonomous in that they always respond in a fixed way and their behaviour can be completely determined by other agents. In this paper we investigate the case where there might not be a (or one) fixed protocol for the social interaction and where the agents do not necessarily react in the same way to each message from other agents. We distinguish between the agents perception of the world and the “real” state of the world and show how these views can be related.

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