Agents with an Attitude

We describe a virtual marketplace where buying and selling agents that learn from experience enter the market with an ’attitude’ (a mental state) formulated as a complex function of prior experience(s), market conditions, product information as well as personal characteristics such as importance of time vs. importance of price and the commitment level to the purchase/sale of the product. Agents learn by using prior experiences to adjust their attitude. While buying and selling agents are assumed to have opposing interests, and are thus engaged in a competitive negotiation, we will show here that the mental state model can also be extended to other types of situations where agents are deliberating in a cooperative environment.