Abstract
Principal Agent Theory (PAT) seeks to identify the incentives and sanctions that a consumer should apply when entering into a contract with a provider in order to maximise their own utility. However, identifying suitable contracts—maximising utility while minimising regret— is difficult, particularly when little information is available about provider competencies. In this paper we show that a global contract can be used to govern such interactions, derived from the properties of a representative agent. After describing how such a contract can be obtained, we analyse the contract utility space and its properties. Then, we show how this contract can be used to address the cold start problem and that it significantly outperforms other approaches. Finally, we discuss how our work can be integrated with existing research into multi-agent systems.
F. Cerutti—The work was performed when the author was affiliated with the University of Aberdeen.
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Notes
- 1.
In other words, all agents have the same preference ordering \(\succ _o\) over tasks.
- 2.
Shared utility functions are widely employed in cooperative contexts [4], which is also the main focus of our research.
- 3.
We admit a small abuse of notation: formally \(delegate\) returns a tuple of two elements. In this case we silently assume that returns only the first element of such a tuple, namely the outcome of task \(\tau \) or \( abs \).
- 4.
The code can be found at the URL https://sourceforge.net/projects/global-approximations-pat/.
- 5.
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Acknowledgments
We thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
Research was sponsored by US Army Research laboratory and the UK Ministry of Defence and was accomplished under Agreement Number W911NF-06-3-0001. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the US Army Research Laboratory, the U.S. Government, the UK Ministry of Defense, or the UK Government. The US and UK Governments are authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for Government purposes notwithstanding any copyright notation hereon.
This work was performed using the Maxwell High Performance Computing Cluster of the University of Aberdeen IT Service (http://www.abdn.ac.uk/staffnet/research/research-computing), provided by Dell Inc. and supported by Alces Software.
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Cerutti, F., Burnett, C., Oren, N. (2016). Representative Agents and the Cold Start Problem in Contract Negotiation. In: Dignum, V., Noriega, P., Sensoy, M., Sichman, J. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems XI. COIN 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9628. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42691-4_3
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