Designing Conventions for Automated Negotiation

As distributed systems of computers play an increasingly important role in society, it will be necessary to consider ways in which these machines can be made to interact effectively. We are concerned with heterogeneous, distributed systems made up of machines that have been programmed by different entities to pursue different goals. Adjusting the rules of public behavior (the rules of the game) by which the programs must interact can influence the private strategies that designers set up in their machines. These rules can shape the design choices of the machines' programmers and, thus, the run-time behavior of their creations. Certain kinds of desirable social behavior can thus be caused to emerge through the careful design of interaction rules.