Equilibrium Analysis of the Possibilities of Unenforced Exchange in Multiagent Systems

In multiagent systems interaction protocols are usually enforced by law Enforcement is prob lematic among computational agents because they may operate under incomplete or di erent laws the laws may not be uniformly enforced and the agents can vanish easily This paper presents an enforcement free method for car rying out exchanges so that both agents are motivated to abide to their contract This is achieved by splitting the exchanged goods into partial exchanges so that at each step both agents bene t more from the future of the ex change than from vanishing with the goods or payment The conditions for such exchange are presented in general and the maximum deliveries and payments for any point in the exchange are solved for Similar analysis is carried out for the case where the agents current actions a ect their future contracts Strategic delaying is also discussed The pa per presents a fast algorithm that will nd a sequence of independent partial deliveries in a way that enables unenforced exchange if such a sequence exists This problem cannot be solved in polynomial time if the partial deliveries are interdependent Finally the paper shows that the unenforced exchange scheme hinders unfair renegotiation