Selectively Injecting Organizational Influences into Decision-Theoretic Agents

In this paper, we summarize our prior work on exerting organizational influence on a decision-theoretic agent by replacing components of its Dec-POMDP model. We show how replacing various components can correspond to different prior notions of organizational control, and summarize the impact that different replacements can have on the quality and overhead of coordinated behavior. The innovation of this paper is then presented, which is a principled methodology for organizational influence to be modeled as a partial, factored specification of a DecPOMDP component, and for overlaying this onto (rather than simply replacing) an agent’s pre-existing local component specification. By doing so, organizational influences can better complement the agents’ local expertise. We illustrate these ideas and discuss some of the qualitative properties of our proposed technique through analytical evaluation across several performance dimensions.