Construction and Evaluation of Social Agents in Hybrid Settings: Approach and Experimental Results of the INKA Project

We present an integrated approach to the modelling, implementation and examination of social agents as consecutive steps in an interdisciplinary research process. The multi-agent system developed is inspired by sociological role concepts to provide agents with the capability to negotiate on the basis of social expectations. The overall goal of our system is to allow direct interaction between agents and humans. In order to examine these hybrid constellations we developed an experimental approach, termed \'Interactivity Experiment\'. An initial experiment showed that human settings, agent settings and mixed settings produce very different results, and that heterogeneous settings are superior to homogeneous settings.