Courtesy as a Means to Coordinate

TL;DR

This paper introduces CA^3NONY, a courtesy-based framework for multi-agent coordination that achieves rapid, fair, and efficient allocations, outperforming existing algorithms in convergence speed and payoff.

Contribution

The paper proposes a novel courtesy-based coordination framework that guarantees equilibrium strategies and significantly improves convergence speed and fairness in multi-agent systems.

Findings

CA^3NONY achieves over 100x faster convergence than state-of-the-art algorithms.

The framework ensures fair and efficient resource allocations.

Simulation results demonstrate superior average payoff and fairness.

Abstract

We investigate the problem of multi-agent coordination under rationality constraints. Specifically, role allocation, task assignment, resource allocation, etc. Inspired by human behavior, we propose a framework (CA^3NONY) that enables fast convergence to efficient and fair allocations based on a simple convention of courtesy. We prove that following such convention induces a strategy which constitutes an $\epsilon$-subgame-perfect equilibrium of the repeated allocation game with discounting. Simulation results highlight the effectiveness of CA^3NONY as compared to state-of-the-art bandit algorithms, since it achieves more than two orders of magnitude faster convergence, higher efficiency, fairness, and average payoff.