Simultaneously Modeling Humans' Preferences and their Beliefs about Others' Preferences

Abstract

In strategic multi-agent decision making, it is often the case that a strategic reasoner must hold beliefs about other agents and use these beliefs to inform its decision making. The behavior thus produced by the reasoner reflects an interaction between the reasoner’s beliefs about other agents and the reasoner’s own preferences. In this paper, we are interested to investigate human reasoning, particularly the interaction between a human’s utility function and the beliefs the human holds to reason about other agents. A significant challenge faced by model designers, therefore, is how to model such a reasoner’s behavior so that the reasoner’s preferences and beliefs can each be identified and distinguished from each other. In this paper, we introduce a model of strategic human reasoning that allows us to distinguish between the human’s utility function and the human’s beliefs about another agent’s utility function as well as the human’s beliefs about how that agent might interact with yet other agents. We show that our model is uniquely identifiable. We then illustrate the performance of our model in a multi-agent negotiation game.