Increasing Information in Socio-Technical MAS Considered Contentious

Socio-technical systems differ from typical MAS formulations in that efficiency of the system is not the only concern of the participating agents. Human attributes such as concern for social equity, lying and irrationality are also present, alongside the normal computation being undertaken by the agents. Typically, non-rational attributes are considered as noise and therefore not considered as important attributes of the system. In this paper, we consider noise in socio-technical systems and show that the typical reaction of increasing information to counter noise is ineffective. We show that endowing agents with increased memory and/or computational power is not necessarily beneficial to achieving the goal of the system.