Decision-Making under Group Commitment

Abstract

Coordination is essential for establishing and sustaining teamwork. Agents in a team must agree on their tasks and plans, and thus, group decision-making techniques are necessary to reach agreements in teams. For instance, to agree on a joint task, the agents can provide their preferences for the alternative tasks, and the best alternative could be selected by majority. Previous works assumed that agents only provide their preferences for the alternatives. However, when selecting a joint task for teamwork, it is essential to consider not only the preferences of the agents, but also the probability of the agents being able to execute the task if it is selected. In this paper, we propose a novel model, the decIsion-MAking under Group commItmeNt modEl (IMAGINE), for computing the optimal decision for a team considering several parameters. Each agent provides: (1) the utility of each alternative for the team, (2) the associated cost for the agent by executing the alternative, and (3) the probability that the agent will be able to execute the alternative task. The IMAGINE gathers these data from the agents, as well as the requisite quorum for each alternative task, which is the minimum number of agents required to complete the task successfully. Given this information, the IMAGINE determines the optimal decision for the group. We evaluated the IMAGINE by comparing it to a baseline method that does not consider the quorum requirement. We show that the IMAGINE generally comes up with a better decision than the baseline method and that the higher the quorum, the better the decisions the IMAGINE makes are.

Keywords

• decision-making
• quorum
• commitment