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Evaluating the Cost of Enforcement by Agent-Based Simulation: A Wireless Mobile Grid Example

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PRIMA 2013: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems (PRIMA 2013)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 8291))

Abstract

The subject of this paper is the cost of enforcement, to which we take a satisficing approach through the examination of marginal cost-benefit ratios. Social simulation is used to establish that less enforcement can be beneficial overall in economic terms, depending on the costs to system and/or stakeholders arising from enforcement. The results are demonstrated by means of a case study of wireless mobile grids (WMGs). In such systems the dominant strategy for economically rational users is to free-ride, i.e. to benefit from the system without contributing to it. We examine the use of enforcement agents that police the system and punish users that take but do not give. The agent-based simulation shows that a certain proportion of enforcement agents increases cooperation in WMG architectures. The novelty of the results lies in our empirical evidence for the diminishing marginal utility of enforcement agents: that is how much defection they can foreclose at what cost. We show that an increase in the number of enforcement agents does not always increase the overall benefits-cost ratio, but that with respect to satisficing, a minimum proportion of enforcement agents can be identified that yields the best results.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Research in Social Simulation, University of Surrey, UK

    Tina Balke

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, University of Bath, UK

    Tina Balke, Marina De Vos & Julian Padget

Authors
  1. Tina Balke
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  2. Marina De Vos
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  3. Julian Padget
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Dipartimento di Informatica,, Università degli Studi di Torino, via Pessinetto 12,, 10149, Torino, Italy

    Guido Boella

  2. Division of Mathematical Sciences, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

    Edith Elkind

  3. Department of Information Science, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Bastin Tony Roy Savarimuthu  & Martin K. Purvis  & 

  4. Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Frank Dignum

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© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Balke, T., De Vos, M., Padget, J. (2013). Evaluating the Cost of Enforcement by Agent-Based Simulation: A Wireless Mobile Grid Example. In: Boella, G., Elkind, E., Savarimuthu, B.T.R., Dignum, F., Purvis, M.K. (eds) PRIMA 2013: Principles and Practice of Multi-Agent Systems. PRIMA 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8291. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-44927-7_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-44927-7_3

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-44926-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-44927-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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