Empathetic decision making in social networks

Influence Across Agents and Issues in Combinatorial and Collective Decision-Making

“…Most previous works either studied the influence among multiple agents while making decisions on a single issue (usually, in the framework of social networks) [5,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]19,20,[23][24][25][26]34,35,37] or studied the dependency among multiple issues decided by a single agent (typically, using the model of CP-nets, namely, conditional preference networks) [2,3,18,36,38,39]. A few studies have combined the influence among multiple agents and the dependency among multiple issues [32,33] in the same model, but they still just discussed them separately and did not study the influence across both agents and issues.…”

“…1) among agents (member states). The models describing the influence among agents are mainly the social influence models [5,[8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]19,20,25,26,35,37].…”

“…As such, how do we address the multiple sources of influence and determine the resulting preference or choice, especially in light of contradictive influencing directions (such as a positive influence from Russia and a negative influence from the United States) and diversified influencing weights (such as a stronger influence from a great power and a weaker influence from a small country)? [25] Models addressing multiple sources of influence include the empathetic social choice [37], social influence functions [25] and so on.…”

“…Multiple sources of influence in group decision-making have been preliminarily discussed by Salehi-Abari and Boutilier [37] as an empathetic social choice model in the environment of social networks, setting a weight of influence for each influencing agent, in which an agent's utility value is collectively affected by both other agents' utilities and his/her own initial utility. As both the subject of influence and the object of influence are utility values of agents, it is a cardinal (utility value-based) approach.…”

“…The information that agents exchange can be from other agents' observable (decision-making) behaviors [32] or from others agents' declared or shared preferences (underlying their choices) [25]. Actually, the interaction and influence among agents while making decisions is quite common in reality, and has been studied by scholars from multiple disciplines [25,26], including computer science and artificial intelligence (particularly multi-agent system) [5,17,25,26,32,33,35,37], economics and management science (particularly decision theory and social network) [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]19,20,23,24,34], and even politics [28]. For example, in international politics, the decision-making process of the United Nations (UN) Security Council entails various influences among member states, including both positive influences among allies and negative influences among opponents.…”