Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) deals with computational systems where several intelligent components interact in a common environment. This paper is aimed at pointing out and fostering the exchange between DAI and cognitive and social science in order to deal with the issues of interaction, and in particular with the reasons and possible strategies for social behaviour in multi-agent interaction is also described which is motivated by requirements of cognitive plausibility and grounded the notions of power, dependence and help. Connections with (...) human-computer interaction are also suggested. (shrink)

Designing models of complex phenomena is a difficult task in engineering that can be tackled by composing a number of partial models to produce a global model of the phenomena. We propose to embed the partial models in software agents and to implement their composition as a cooperative negotiation between the agents. The resulting multiagent system provides a global model of a phenomenon. We applied this approach in modelling two complex physiological processes: the heart rate regulation and the glucose-insulin metabolism. (...) Beyond the effectiveness demonstrated in these two applications, the idea of using models associated to software agents to give reason of complex phenomena is in accordance with current tendencies in epistemology, where it is evident an increasing use of computational models for scientific explanation and analysis. Therefore, our approach has not only a practical, but also a theoretical significance: agents embedding models are a technology suitable both to representing and to investigating reality. (shrink)

Several allocation rules allow for possible violations of the ‘independence of irrelevant alternatives’ axiom in cooperative bargaining game theory. Nonetheless, there is no conclusive evidence on how contractions of feasible sets exactly affect bargaining outcomes. We have been able to identify a definite behavioral channel through which such contractions actually determine the outcomes of negotiated bargaining. We find that the direction and the extent of changes in bargaining outcomes, due to contraction of the feasible set, respond to the level of (...) agent asymmetry with a remarkable degree of regularity. Alongside, we conclude that the validity of the IIA axiom is only limited to symmetric games. (shrink)