Improving the social capital of trust-based competitive Multi-Agent Systems by introducing meritocracy

A main issue in competitive Multi-Agent Systems is that of allowing self-interested agents to mutually cooperate in those cases where the local agent resources are not sufficient to satisfy user requests. To this end, it is necessary to introduce an internal organization for allowing agents to form suitable friendships and groups facilitating the collaboration. In the past, several approaches have been proposed aiming at forming agent coalitions which maximize the profit of the group or the individual agent. However, this viewpoint could introduce some negative side-effects, namely (i) it can lead to reward the most aggressive agents, also if they have bad social behaviours or (ii) it could introduce a sort of social flattening, without taking into account the differences among the agents in terms of merit. To face this issue, in this paper we propose an algorithm for forming friendships and groups which, instead of maximizing individual or global profit, tries to optimize a social capital represented by the mutual trust relationships. We theoretically prove that the application of our algorithm leads the competition to reward those agents exhibiting the most virtuous behaviours, introducing meritocracy in the system, not only rewarding effective agent performances but also encouraging correct behaviours.