Coordination of Distributed Information and Decisions

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Recognition of the importance of multiagent coordination has mounted over recent years, to the degree that it has now assumed a genuine sense of urgency. In the engineering literature, attempts have been made to address this issue in areas as varied as multiuser information theory, the theory of distributed estimation and detection, and decentralized control. Economists have also had a long standing concern with these issues. Coordination of distributed means, desires and information using market mechanisms is a central area of economic research. Computer scientists working on distributed computing also have begun to address coordination issues over the past decade. A glance at any popular science magazine will reveal the increasingly distributed nature of information in today's world and the timeliness of addressing this trend intelligently. In particular, it is of considerable importance to combine ideas form such diverse areas as engineering, economics and computational sciences, and fashion them into a coherent theory of coordination. The proposed work on multiagent coordination theory can be roughly classified as (i) establishing fundamental bounds on the costs of enabling coordination, (ii) understanding the optimal mechanisms of coordination, and (iii) investigation aggregation methods for situations where large numbers of agents are involved in the coordination task.