Multi-agent Negotiation to Support an Economy for Online Help and Tutoring

We are designing a computational architecture for a "learning economy" based on personal software agents who represent users in a virtual society and assist them in finding learning resources and peer help. In order to motivate users to participate, to share their experience, offer help and create on-line learning resources, payment is involved in virtual currency and the agents negotiate for services and prices, as in a free market. We model negotiation among personal agents by means of an influence diagram, a decision theoretic tool. In addition, agents create models of their opponents1 during negotiation to predict opponent actions. Simulations have been carried out to test the effectiveness of the negotiation mechanism. An attempt has been made to test the benefits of the proposed economy as a basis for the peer help environment, I-Help. Keywords multi-agent architecture, negotiation, peerhelp system, distributed educational systems, learning economy, personal agents, mo...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ITS
• Authors: Chhaya Mudgal, Julita Vassileva
• Keywords: ITS 2000, Learning Economy, Multimedia, Peer Help, Personal Agents