Negotiating Socially Optimal Allocations of Resources

TL;DR

This paper explores how multiagent negotiations can lead to socially optimal resource allocations, analyzing the impact of different deal classes on social welfare and the conditions needed for optimal outcomes.

Contribution

It introduces an abstract negotiation framework for resource exchange among autonomous agents and identifies deal classes that ensure convergence to socially optimal allocations.

Findings

Certain deal classes are both sufficient and necessary for optimal allocations.

Analysis of how deals influence social welfare under various interpretations.

Framework demonstrates convergence to social optima in multiagent systems.

Abstract

A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this paper, we study an abstract negotiation framework where agents can agree on multilateral deals to exchange bundles of indivisible resources. We then analyse how these deals affect social welfare for different instances of the basic framework and different interpretations of the concept of social welfare itself. In particular, we show how certain classes of deals are both sufficient and necessary to guarantee that a socially optimal allocation of resources will be reached eventually.