RASTA'03: Time table

Second International Workshop on
Regulated Agent-Based Social Systems:
Theories and Applications (RASTA'03)

Workshop date: 23 June, 2003

11:30 - 12:15: Utility in Interacting Markets? - A Position Paper -
Luis Antunes, Joao Faria, and Helder Coelho

Neoclassical economics postulates utility theory as a central means to produce and explain decisions of rational agents. In decision domains such as markets, it should be supposedly easy to fulfill the set of rigid conditions presupposed by utility theory, and fully explain/predict the observed behaviours. Despite all the criticism, in multi-agent systems, utility theory is still usually adopted to produce choosing behaviour. And even global outcomes (many times deemed `emergent') can be extrapolated from that `perfect world' view, the most common being the capitalist motto that the world is better if everyone pursues his own selfinterest.
In this paper we take an experimental shot into the effects of removing the assumptions of utility theory. This is a further effort to demonstrate the kind of misleading conclusions that can be (and usually are) extracted from models based on utility theory. We argue that utility theory is ill, and the cure is to consider choices as volition-dependent, as much as reason-dependent. We are concerned with the use of such economics concepts in the multi-agent systems community. Artificial intelligence was born against a utilitarian view of rational agents, and it is surprising that the use of a homo oeconomicus still finds so many adepts in the field.