Agent X has certain expectations (predictions + wishes) about Y’s behavior, and relies, counts upon that behavior in order to perform her action and achieve the goal; she is allocating a part of her plan to Y. X can just count on Y’s action by exploiting Y’s autonomous action; Y can be unaware. In stronger forms, X actively assigns that part of the plan to Y (by authority or exchange or cooperative agreement or request for help, etc.); Y accepts this. This notion of Delegation is more basic and broader than the ‘institutional’ notion (usually used in organizations), where X not only allocate a part of her plan to Y, but she also ‘empowers’ Y for doing this, and passes to him some resource, and (more important) some responsibility or duty which was of X or of the group or organization.
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.