In this paper, we investigate techniques via which a group of autonomous agents can reach a global agreement on the use of social conventions by using only locally available information. Such conventions play a central role in naturallyoccurring social systems, and there are good masons tbr supposing that they will play a similarly important role in artificial social systems. Following a short review of conventions and their use in distributed artificial intelligence, we present a formal model that rigorously defines both our experimental methodology, and the performance measures we use [o quantify the success of our experiments. We then describe sixteen different mechanisms for bringing about agreement on conventions, and present experimental results obtained for each of these methods. A tentative analysis of these results is given, and the paper concludes with some comments and issues for future work.
['Adam Walker', 'Michael Wooldridge']
Understanding the Emergence of Conventions in Multi-Agent Systems