The Dutch eat at 5:30 pm: Shared Strategies for Agent Reasoning (Extended Abstract)
Amineh Ghorbani, Pablo Noriega · 2012
In the Netherlands, almost all people have dinner around5:30pm. As a foreigner in that country, it is almost impos-sible to plan a (working) meeting around this time, whichwould be a ‘normal’ time in many other countries. On theother hand, having dinner that early is not an obligation.No one will be o ended or would even care if you chooseto eat later. This is an example of a shared strategy, i.e.an institutional arrangement where di erent actors have theintention of performing the same task at a certain time orsetting [4].Even though the concept of shared strategy is socially andcomputationally very instrumental, it has not yet been im-plemented nor formalized in the MAS literature. First, itdetermines the general behaviour of the system thus provid-ing expectations that accommodate the behaviour. For ex-ample, restaurants should start preparing meals early sincethere will be many people coming at that time. Second, thisnotion adds a new dimension to the deontic classical conceptwhere there is no obligation, permission or prohibition, yeta shared behaviour takes place.In MAS research, shared strategies can be a new way of ex-pressing conventions that cannot easily be tted into normsas they have no deontic ‘avour’ to it. Moreover, sharedstrategies are an expectation on individual behavior, ratherAppears in: Proceedings of the 11th International Con-ference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems(AAMAS 2012)