Destabilising Conventions: Characterising the Cost

Abstract

Conventions are often used in multi-agent systems to achieve coordination amongst agents without creating additional system requirements. Encouraging the emergence of robust conventions via fixed strategy agents is one of the main methods of manipulating how conventions emerge. In this paper we demonstrate that fixed strategy agents can also be used to destabilise and remove established conventions. We examine the minimum level of intervention required to cause destabilisation, and explore the effect of different pricing mechanisms on the cost of interventions. We show that there is an inverse relationship between cost and the number of fixed strategy agents used. Finally, we investigate the effectiveness of placing fixed strategy agents by their cost, for different pricing mechanisms, as a mechanism for causing destabilisation. We show that doing so produces comparable results to placing by known metrics.