Achieving Emergent Governance in Competitive Multi-Agent Systems

Our PhD research is concerned with the task of achieving cooperation in a system of competitive agents which cannot be explicitly controlled. To this end, it examines the problem from the system's point of view, without restricting the agents' behavior or requiring specific knowledge about their decision-making. The governance of the MAS will be achieved via a dynamically adaptive governing policy based on a set of rules, which leaves full autonomy to the individual agents, but reacts to their actions via suitable changes of the environment. The mechanism is designed to lead to system-level cooperation while only assuming that the agents follow their own self-interested motives.