No free lunches in multi-agent systems,-a characteristic distribution approach to game theoretic modelling

Abstract

We introduce the notion of Characteristic Distributions which is a way of representing information about the payoffs of different behaviors in a Multi-agent System. We discuss how they can be used to simplify and structure the analysis of strategies and prove i) the existence of optimal environments, given a certain behavior, and ii) that all behaviors payoff equally, when taken over all possible environments (no free lunch theorem for strategies).