Editorial : Economic Principles of Multi - Agent

An oft-noted feature of artiicial intelligence research is its interdisciplinary nature. AI draws on, and contributes to, research in such diverse elds as philosophy, logic, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, mechanical engineering, control theory|and of course many other areas of computer science. A discipline of great relevance to AI which has perhaps received less attention until recently is economics. A primary goal of AI is the creation of decision-making artifacts, or agents, that act, with varying degrees of autonomy, on behalf of their designers, owners , or users. In service of this goal, the predominant approach in AI has been to endow the agents with interests of their own (coinciding with those of the party on whose behalf they act) as well as reasoning mechanisms based on principles of rationality of one kind or another. Naturally, then, when AI researchers have considered multi-agent systems, the agents have generally been similarly endowed with interests, rational decision-making capabilities, and| importantly|the ability to model the interests and capabilities of other agents. Stated this way, it is at rst puzzling why the connection between AI and economics has not been stronger heretofore. After all, the decision-making behaviors of self-interested agents as they interact with their environment (including , especially, other self-interested agents), the resulting emergent phenomena, and mechanisms that can innuence these behaviors, are the province of economic theory. Why then has economics not had a more tangible impact on AI? We see two fundamental reasons, one substantive and one cultural. The slight economic innuence on AI to date may be due in part to the diier-ent objectives of the elds. Economics is primarily concerned with explaining the decisions and interactions of rational self-interested agents (or communities thereof), or designing policies that innuence these interactions to further certain global objectives. AI, in contrast, is largely (though not exclusively) concerned with constructing self-interested agents, the very entities economic 1