A formal account of opportunism based on the situation calculus

Abstract

In social interactions, it is common for individuals to possess different amounts of knowledge about a specific transaction, and those who are more knowledgeable might perform opportunistic behavior to others in their interest, which promotes their value but demotes others' value. Such a typical social behavior is called opportunistic behavior (opportunism). In this paper, we propose a formal account of opportunism based on the situation calculus. We first propose a model of opportunism that only considers a single action between two agents, and then extend it to multiple actions and incorporate social context in the model. A simple example of selling a broken cup is used to illustrate our models. Through our models, we can have a thorough understanding of opportunism.

A formal framework for reasoning about opportunistic propensity in multi-agent systems

“…Based on it, we define a value system as a strict total order over a set of values, representing the degree of importance, which are inspired by the preference lists in [15] the goal structure in [16]. Having this definition makes it easier for us to specify agents' preferences over any two different states, and it is also consistent with the way of specifying state preferences in [6]. Definition 2 (Value system) A value system V = (Val, ≺) is a tuple consisting of a finite set Val = {v, .…”

“…Before reasoning about opportunistic propensity, we should first formally know what opportunism actually is. Opportunism is a social behavior that takes advantage of relevant knowledge asymmetry and results in promoting one's own value and demoting others' value [6]. It means that it is performed with the precondition of relevant knowledge asymmetry and the effect of promoting agents' own value and demoting others' value.…”

“…It follows that agent j is partially or completely not aware of it. Compared to the definition of opportunism in [6], Definition 9 models the precondition of performing opportunistic behavior in an explicit way while value opposition is derived by Proposition 5 as a property. As is stressed in [6], opportunistic behavior is performed by intent rather than by accident.…”

“…Compared to the definition of opportunism in [6], Definition 9 models the precondition of performing opportunistic behavior in an explicit way while value opposition is derived by Proposition 5 as a property. As is stressed in [6], opportunistic behavior is performed by intent rather than by accident. In this paper, instead of explicitly modeling intention with a modality as we did in [6], we interpret intention from agents' rationality that agents always intentionally promote their own values.…”

“…A large amount of research from social science was done to investigate opportunistic behavior from its own perspective [3][4][5], providing a descriptive theoretical foundation to the study of opportunism. In this paper, by using the notion of values as abstract standards of agents' preferences over states, we further interpret the original definition as a selfish behavior that takes advantage of relevant knowledge asymmetry and results in promoting one's own value and demoting others' value [6].…”