Monitoring opportunism in multi-agent systems

Abstract

Opportunism is a behavior that causes norm violation and promotes agents’ own value. In the context of multi-agent systems, it is important to constrain such a selfish behavior through setting enforcement norms. Because opportunistic behavior cannot be observed directly, there has to be a monitoring mechanism that can detect the performance of opportunistic behavior in the system. This paper provides a logical framework based on the specification of actions to specify monitoring approaches for opportunism. We investigate how to evaluate agents’ actions to be opportunistic with respect to different forms of norms when those actions cannot be observed directly, and study how to reduce the monitoring cost for opportunism.