Goal-Adoption is when an autonomous agent X with her own goal comes to have a new goal (and possibly pursue it), since and until she believe that it is the goal of another agent Y, in order Y realizes his goal. Goal-Adoption can be there both for altruistic or for selfish reasons. A special kind of Goal-Adoption is Goal-Adhesion: where X ‘accepts’ to help Y, since there is an (implicit or explicit) request (expectation, order, will, …) that she does something for Y.
Published in Chapter:
Grounding Organizations in the Minds of the Agents
Cristiano Castelfranchi (ISTC-CNR, Italy)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-256-5.ch010
Abstract
This chapter presents organizations as a macro-micro notion and device; they presuppose autonomous proactive entities (agents) playing the organizational roles. Agents may have their own powers, goals, relationships (of dependence, trust, etc.). This opens important issues to be discussed: Does cooperation require mentally shared plans? Which is the relationship between individual powers and role powers; personal dependencies and role dependencies; personal goals and assigned goals; personal beliefs and what we have to assume when playing our role; individual actions and organizational actions? What about possible conflicts, deviations, power abuse, given the agents’ autonomy? MultiAgentSystems discipline should both aim at scientifically modeling human organizations, and at designing effective artificial organizations. Our claim is that for both those aims, one should model a high (risky) degree of flexibility, exploiting autonomy and pro-activity, intelligence and decentralized knowledge of roleplayers, allowing for functional violations of requests and even of rules.