How Is an Agent Like a Wolf?: Dominance and Submission in Multi-Agent Systems

O Abstract Agents are automating many tasks that used to be done by people. As agents begin to address more complex domains of human life, they will need to develop an understanding of the dominance hierarchies that people understand intuitively. We present examples of species with social hierarchies that occur in the natural world, in particular the gray wolf (Canis lupus) and the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), to show how an awareness of social status could benefit multi-agent systems. We present three main areas where dominance hierarchies could benefit these systems – as a mechanism for streamlining negotiation, as a means of facilitating mutually beneficial alliances among agents, and as a way of making interfaces to agents more intuitive for the people who create and interact with them. With regard to implementation, we propose that the three main elements necessary for an agent to participate in a social hierarchy are: an internal representation of its relationships with other agents, a means of communicating socially with those other individuals, and a desire to achieve its goals. As both a way of implementing multiagent systems and as a means of understanding them, dominance hierarchies will be a valuable tool for creating systems that can mirror human complexity and thrive in complex social environments.