Emergence of Collaboration among Competitive Agents in Information Sharing Networks†

Agents often need information from other information providers or agents to build a situational picture for goal achievement. However, in competitive environments, such as an open system populated by self-interested agents, agents who can provide information may not want to provide information unless the information supply aids in their own goal achievement. This research assumes that agents can act as information providers and consumers at the same time, and proposes a method, by introducing Competitive Collaborating Agents (CoCoA), for deciding the multidimensional strategies regarding requesting information and providing information. For the strategy as an information consumer, stochastic games are deployed so that an agent can explicitly take into account its own request strategy and other agents’ strategy for providing information. The degree of collaboration constitutes an agent’s strategy as an information provider. Following the best strategy for information providers and consumers lead the agents to construct collaborative relationships among competitive but complementary agents.