Towards a social level characterisation of socially responsible agents

A high-level framework for analysing and designing intelligent agents is presented. The framework's key abstraction mechanism is a new computer level called the social level. The social level sits immediately above the knowledge level, as defined by Allen Newell, and is concerned with the inherently social aspects of multiple-agent systems. To illustrate the working of this framework, an important new class of agent is identified and then specified. Socially responsible agents retain their local autonomy but still draw from, and supply resources to, the larger community. Through empirical evaluation, it is shown that such agents produce both good system-wide performance and good individual performance.