Delegation-based conflicts between client and contractor

Delegation and its related conflicts are the core of the interaction with any kind of autonomous agent and are relevant for modelling both Multi-Agent Systems (MASs), organizations, and user-agents interaction. On the one side, in order to exploit local knowledge and local adaptation delegation cannot be fully specified, and, on the other side, in order to be really helpful and collaborative the delegated agent frequently must go beyond the literally delegated task (request). In this perspective we present in this paper a plan-based definition of the very basic notions of delegation, adoption and task, and a theory of different kinds and levels of delegation and adoption. Then we focus on conflicts arising between an agent (the "client") delegating some tasks to some other agent, and this agent (the "contractor") adopting and/or satisfying those tasks; conflicts which are either due to the intelligence and the initiative of the delegated agent or to an inappropriate delegation by the client. We examine different possible types of mismatch between the delegation and the provided help: sub help, over help, critical help, hyper-critical help. We neither analyse conflicts due to some misunderstanding or to the helper's personal interest, nor conflicts about the delegation of the monitoring.