A Formalization of Multiagent Organizations in Business Information Systems.

Multiagent (MA) organizations can be regarded as a functional part in business information systems, in which software agents negotiate conditions for participation in the organization. How the strategic behavior of self-interested agents and MA-Organizations affects the formation process, however, is still not known. This research is concerned with the specification of MA-Organizations in business information systems and the design of negotiation protocols for determining the agents participation conditions. We draw on mechanism design to model the participation decision of the agent and the organization as a bilateral trading game. In a simulation experiment we find that a rather simple manipulation scheme provides a suitable approximation for the equilibrium strategies employed by the agents.