Paper detail

Endogenous games with goals: side-payments among goal-directed artificial agents

Artificial agents are typically oriented to the realization of an externally assigned task and try to optimize over secondary aspects of plan execution such time lapse or power consumption, technically displaying a quasi-dichotomous preference relation. Boolean games have been developed as a paradigm for modelling societies of agents with this type of preference. In boolean games agents exercise control over propositional variables and strive to achieve a goal formula whose realization might require the opponents' cooperation. Recently, a theory of incentive engineering for such games has been devised, where an external authority steers the outcome of the game towards certain desirable properties consistent with players' goals, by imposing a taxation mechanism on the players that makes the outcomes that do not comply with those properties less appealing to them. The present contribution stems from a complementary perspective and studies, instead, how games with quasi-dichotomous preferences can be transformed from inside, rather than from outside, by endowing players with the possibility of sacrificing a part of their payoff received at a certain outcome in order to convince other players to play a certain strategy. Concretely we explore the properties of endogenous games with goals, obtained coupling strategic games with goals, a generalization of boolean games, with the machinery of endogenous games coming from game theory. We analyze equilibria in those structures, showing the preconditions needed for desirable outcomes to be achieved without external intervention. What our results show is that endogenous games with goals display specific irreducible features - with respect to what already known for endogenous games - which makes them worth studying in their own sake.