Some time ago, in the garden of a friend’s house, my 5-year-old son and his chum were struggling over possession of a water hose. (They were in conflict.) Each wanted to use it first to water the garden. (They had a competitive orientation.) Each was trying to tug it away from the other and both were crying. Each was very frustrated, and neither was able to use the hose to sprinkle the flowers ...

Multi-agent systems considered in the paper consist of a finite number of agents, positions of which can be changed by system actions, and of an evaluation function which assigns to each agent a value of its current position (as e.g. the distance from the intended target). The set of all possible values is ordered; the intention of each agent is to reach a position with the minimum value. Any s...

Some time ago, in the garden of a friend’s house, my 5-year-old son and his chum were struggling over possession of a water hose. (They were in conflict.) Each wanted to use it first to water the garden. (They had a competitive orientation.) Each was trying to tug it away from the other and both were crying. Each was very frustrated, and neither was able to use the hose to sprinkle the flowers ...