Copyright © 2013 Jiafang Wang et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This paper presents a formalized communicating process for dealing with information asymmetry between agents. A proactive process can improve the efficiency of dealing with asymmetry by allowing agents to take the initiative of communication in a goal-oriented way. In the process, by reasoning on belief and intention about the world and figuring out the information needed, the agent proactively requests information from another agent when asymmetry exists between them. Considering that agents may take advantage of information asymmetry by hiding information, the process also includes a model based on game theory to restrict the hiding behaviour. The work presented here not only introduces a definition of information asymmetry from cognitive perspective but also proposes a way to deal with it by communication in MAS. In addition, this paper presents some basic ideas on designing proactive mechanisms in cooperation between agents.