When an agent overstates his/her true performance, a rational market can simply discount the reported performance, and correctly guess the true performance. This paper shows, however, that such rational market discounting leads to less productive effort by the agent and less performance-pay by the principal. Therefore, a rational market and a profit-maximizing principal can exacerbate the lack ...

This paper shows why, in a world with differing priors, rational agents tend to attribute their own success more to skill and their failure more to bad luck than an outsider. It further shows why each agent in a group might think he or she is the best, why an agent might overestimate the control he has over the outcome, and why two agents’ estimated contributions often add up to more than 100%....

Barber and Odean (2000) study the relationship between trading frequency and returns. They find that households who trade more frequently have a lower net return than other households. But all households have about the same gross return. They argue that these results cannot emerge from a model with rational traders and instead attribute these findings to overconfidence. Using a dynamic optimiza...

Despite what the somewhat technical namemight suggest, multiple cue probability learning (MCPL) problems are commonly encountered in daily life. For instance, we may have to judge whether it will rain from cues such as temperature, humidity, and the time of year. Or, we may have to judge whether someone is telling the truth from cues such as pitch of voice, level of eye contact, and rate of eye...

Within the area of multi-agent systems, normative systems are a widely used framework for the coordination of interdependent activities. A crucial problem associated with normative systems is that of synthesising norms that effectively accomplish a coordination task and whose compliance forms a rational choice for the agents within the system. In this work, we introduce a framework for the synt...

The theory, models and architectures of intelligent agents are based loosely on the theory of intentions from Bratman resulting in the so-called BDI agents. Although this functions well for single agents it has been long recognized that this approach falls short for multi-agent systems. It lacks appropriate social aspects to make natural interaction possible. The original concept for intelligen...

In this paper, we present offer generation methods for negotiation among multiple agents on multiple issues where agents have no knowledge about the preferences of other agents. Most of the existing literature on non-mediated negotiation consider agents with either full information or probabilistic beliefs about the other agents preferences on the issues. However, in reality, it is usually not ...

Large product variety in mass customization involves a high internal complexity level inside a company’s operations, as well as a high external complexity level from a customer’s perspective. In order to reach a competitive advantage through mass customization, it is necessary to cope with both problems. This is done within the scope of variety formation and variety steering tasks: Variety form...

This paper presents an agent-based simulation framework for the analysis of the equilibria that emerge in a complex structure such as an organization; we can think of some of these equilibria as corporate culture. We concentrate on modeling the effort exerted by heterogeneous agents in an organization, and how the interaction between them may lead to a common level of effort (corporate culture)...

Large product variety in mass customization involves a high internal complexity level inside a company’s operations, as well as a high external complexity level from a customer’s perspective. To cope with both complexity problems, an information system based on agent technology is able to be identified as a suitable solution approach. The mass customized products are assumed to be based on a mo...