What drives seemingly sellsh individuals in multi-agent systems to cooperate with each other? Our answer to the question is \kin preference." Kin preference helps to establish \habitats" that are composed of kin in population of rational agents. These habitats are resistant to invasion of enemies { that is, of non-kin. Results show the importance of kin preference in promoting cooperation and s...

My primary research interest is social behavior for software agents to achieve cooperation in general-sum normal form games. An agent can easily be programmed to constantly cooperate in a normal form game, but such an agent is not suitable for environments with potentially hostile opponents. For a rational agent, the main reason to cooperate is to induce reciprocation therefore it is necessary ...

Task independent interpretation and task dependent specification In our society norms are communicated in natural language, and no-one has yet come up with a method that can unambiguously transfer a natural language into a formal specification that can be used by rational agents acting in a complex and dynamic environment, aiming to achieve goals fitting the agents’ intentions. We use agent-bas...

When several agents act in a common environment their plans may interfere. The predicted outcome of each plan may be altered and the usual notion of valid plan of classical (mono-agent) planification is not sufficient. In this paper we extend this framework to the multi-agent case. We show how the best plans of rational agents can be characterized using game-theoretic notions, especially Nash e...

Financial markets operate as a large interacting group of agents each in a constant struggle to better understand and interpret current prices and information. The complex interconnections between prices and information is probably more dramatic in financial markets than any other economic situation. Economic theory has been capable of describing many different financial equilibria, but it rema...

The BDI model is well accepted as an architecture for representing and realizing rational agents. The beliefs in this model are focused on the representation of beliefs about the world and other agents and are widely independent from the agents intentions. We argue that also the representation of know-how, which captures the beliefs about actions and procedures, has to be taken into account whe...

A number of recent studies have shown that minimally counterintuitive concepts are better recalled than intuitive and maximally counterintuitive concepts. This paper presents a computational model that relates memorability of a concept to the amount of new information that the concept provides to a rational agent seeking to build a more accurate model of its environment. Given two different typ...

This extended abstract gives an overview about my current and future research as well as a summary of my PhD thesis. The thesis is about rational agents in multi-agent systems where the main focus is on formal methods that allow for modelling and reasoning about such systems and its comprised agents. Several aspects of rational agency are treated, for instance, rational agents’ behaviors, coali...