Identifying Optimal Jobs to Work On: The Role of Attitude in Job Selection

In this paper, the meaning of attitude and its role in an agent´s job selection behavior is discussed. When agents build teams, a critical step in improving performance is choosing which jobs to work on in the context of both changing environmental conditions and other agents´ uncertain behaviors. This research introduces a decision theoretic model and the concept of attitude, and provides methods to incorporate different possible attitudes in constructing an expected utility function to guide agents in ranking potential jobs. In this way, attitudes define how an agent prioritizes different possible job choices. Three types of attitudes are defined: attitudes toward proactive behavior, potential risk, and reward. The paper shows that agents using the presented model are able to increase their payoff by identifying optimal jobs under different environmental conditions with varied parameters.