Competition and cooperation in a community of autonomous agents

Agents that perform intelligent tasks interacting with humans in a seamless manner are becoming a reality. In contexts in which interactions among agents repeat over time, they might evolve from a cooperative to a competitive attitude, and vice versa, depending on environmental factors and other contextual circumstances. We provide a framework to model transitions between competition and cooperation in a community of agents. Competition is dealt with through the paradigm of adversarial risk analysis, which provides a disagreement solution; implicitly, we minimize the distance to such solution. Cooperation is handled through a concept of maximal separation from the disagreement solution. Mixtures of both problems are used to refer to in-between behaviour. We illustrate the ideas with several simulations in relation with a group of robots. Our motivation is the constitution of communities of robotic agents that interact among them and with one or more users.