SAMPLING AND UPDATING HIGHER ORDER BELIEFS IN DECISION-THEORETIC BARGAINING WITH FINITE INTERACTIVE EPISTEMOLOGIES

Paul Varkey, Piotr Gmytrasiewicz

2011

Abstract

In this paper we study the sequential strategic interactive setting of bilateral, two-stage, seller-offers bargaining under uncertainty. We model the epistemology of the problem in a finite interactive decision-theoretic framework and solve it for three types of agents of successively increasing (epistemological) sophistication (i.e. capacity to represent and reason with higher orders of beliefs). We relax typical common knowledge assumptions, which, if made, would be sufficient to imply the existence of a, possibly unique, game-theoretic equilibrium solution. We observe and characterize a systematic monotonic relationship between an agent's beliefs and optimal behavior under a particular moment-based ordering of its beliefs. Based on this characterization, we present the \emph{spread-accumulate} technique of sampling an agent's higher order belief by generating ``evenly dispersed" beliefs for which we (pre)compute offline solutions. Higher order prior belief identification is then approximated to arbitrary precision by identifying a (previously solved) belief ``closest" to the true belief. These methods immediately suggest a mechanism for achieving a balance between efficiency and the quality of the approximation -- either by generating a large number of offline solutions or by allowing the agent to search online for a ``closer" belief in the vicinity of best current solution.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Varkey P. and Gmytrasiewicz P. (2011). SAMPLING AND UPDATING HIGHER ORDER BELIEFS IN DECISION-THEORETIC BARGAINING WITH FINITE INTERACTIVE EPISTEMOLOGIES . In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART, ISBN 978-989-8425-41-6, pages 114-123. DOI: 10.5220/0003176901140123

in Bibtex Style

@conference{icaart11,
author={Paul Varkey and Piotr Gmytrasiewicz},
title={SAMPLING AND UPDATING HIGHER ORDER BELIEFS IN DECISION-THEORETIC BARGAINING WITH FINITE INTERACTIVE EPISTEMOLOGIES},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,},
year={2011},
pages={114-123},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0003176901140123},
isbn={978-989-8425-41-6},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - Volume 2: ICAART,
TI - SAMPLING AND UPDATING HIGHER ORDER BELIEFS IN DECISION-THEORETIC BARGAINING WITH FINITE INTERACTIVE EPISTEMOLOGIES
SN - 978-989-8425-41-6
AU - Varkey P.
AU - Gmytrasiewicz P.
PY - 2011
SP - 114
EP - 123
DO - 10.5220/0003176901140123