Socially conscious decision-making

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Abstract
For individually motivated agents to work collaboratively to satisfy shared goals, they must be able to make decisions about actions and intentions in the context of commitments to group activities. This paper examines the role of social consciousness in the process of reconciliation of intentions to do group-related actions with other, conflicting intentions. We define a measure of social consciousness; describe its incorporation into the SPIRE experimental system, a simulation environment that allows the process of intention reconciliation in team contexts to be simulated and studied; and present results of several experiments' that investigate the interaction in decision-making of measures of group and individual good. In particular, we investigate the effect of varying levels of social consciousness on the utility of the group and the individuals it comprises. A key finding is that an intermediate level of social consciousness yields better results than an extreme commitment. We suggest preliminary principles for designers of collaborative agents based on the results. We first describe SPIRE (SharedPlans Intention-Reconcilation Experiments), a simulation system that enables investigation of the effectiveness of different decision-making strategies under various environmental conditions [19]. We then provide a method for assigning a measure to social consciousness in collaborative agents and define a model in which non-monetary social factors play a role in how agents make decisions about their intentions. We show how this measure of social consideration can be made compatible with monetary considerations to create agents whose level of social commitment can be altered and studied using SPIRE. The paper presents the results of several experiments in which the level of social consciousness is varied and the effect on different measures of group income is determined. The experiments also consider environments with different densities of tasks to be accomplished by the group. Contrary to expectations, we find a maximal, intermediate level of social consciousness. We provide suggestions for creating agents that maximize group income while remaining individually rational.

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