Collective Intelligence

Many systems of self-interested agents have an associated performance criterion that rates the dynamic behavior of the overall system. This paper presents an introduction to the science of such systems. Formally, this paper concerns collectives, which are defined as any system having the following two characteristics: First, the system must contain one or more agents each of which we view as trying to maximize an associated private utility. Second, the system must have an associated world utility function that rates the possible behaviors of that overall system [38, 39, 40, 37, 28, 38]. In practice collectives are often very large, distributed, and support little if any centralized communication and control, although those characteristics are not part of their formal definition.