Team Persuasion

We consider two teams of agents engaging in a debate to persuade an audience of the acceptability of a central argument. This is modelled by a bipartite abstract argumentation framework with a distinguished topic argument, where each argument is asserted by a distinct agent. One partition defends the topic argument and the other partition attacks the topic argument. The dynamics are based on flag coordination games: in each round, each agent decides whether to assert its argument based on local knowledge. The audience can see the induced sub-framework of all asserted arguments in a given round, and thus the audience can determine whether the topic argument is acceptable, and therefore which team is winning. We derive an analytical expression for the probability of either team winning given the initially asserted arguments, where in each round, each agent probabilistically decides whether to assert or withdraw its argument given the number of attackers.