Algorithm Diversity: A Mechanism for Distributive Justice in a Socio-Technical MAS

Socio-technical MAS are an intrinsic part of our daily lives. Domains like energy, transport, etc. are increasingly using technology to allow individual users to adapt to, and even influence the aggregate performance of the system. This raises expectations of fairness and equitability, while being engaged in such MAS. Given the autonomous and decentralized nature of socio-technical MAS, it can be difficult to ensure that each agent gets a fair reward for participating in the system. We introduce the notion of algorithmic diversity as a mechanism for nudging the system, in a decentralized manner, to a more equitable state. We use the minority game as an exemplar of a transportation network in a city, and show how diversity of algorithms results in a fairer reward distribution than any individual algorithm alone.