Currency Systems for Efficient and Equitable Exchange Among Selfish Agents in the Air Traffic Management Domain

We study collaboration among selfish agents in the air traffic management domain, in particular in the tactical airport planning domain. Collaboration can be seen as a social exchange scenario, in which the efforts of performing tasks are the resources that are being exchanged. We investigate the use of money as a facilitator for distributed social exchange. We give conditions under which a market mechanism with the use of standard currency leads to efficient and equitable exchange among benevolent agents. We show that with selfish agents, under the same conditions efficiency and equitability are not guaranteed. We investigate whether a coalition of benevolent agents can penalize malicious agents such that efficiency and equitability are restored. We show that a straightforward penalty rule is not robust, as it is attractive to deviate from it. In the second part of this paper, we present a novel currency system that facilitates efficient and equitable exchange among selfish agents. The mechanism allows each agent to issue its own money and circulate that of others. Each credit is valuated individually, based on the reputations of the agents that have used the credit. We give a condition on the reputations under which the system successfully penalizes malicious agents. Unlike the standard currency system, this system is robust as it is not attractive to deviate from the penalty rule.