Inducing Desirable Behaviour through an Incentives Infrastructure

In open multiagent systems, where agents may join/leave the system at runtime, participants can be heterogeneous, self-interested and may have been built with different architectures and languages. Therefore, in such a type of systems, we cannot assure that agents populating the system will behave according to the objectives of the system. To address this problem, organisational abstractions, such as roles, groups and norms, have been proposed as a promising solution. Norms are often coupled with penalties and rewards to deter agents from violating the rules of the system. But, what happens if a current population of agents does not care about these penalties/rewards. To deal with this problem, we propose an incentives infrastructure that allows to estimate agents’ preferences, and can modify the consequences of actions in a way that agents have incentives to act in a certain manner. Employing this infrastructure, a desirable behaviour can be induced in the agents to fulfil the preferences of the system.