  Effective problem solving among multiple agents requires a better
understanding of the role of communication in collaboration. In this paper we
show that there are communicative strategies that greatly improve the
performance of resource-bounded agents, but that these strategies are highly
sensitive to the task requirements, situation parameters and agents' resource
limitations. We base our argument on two sources of evidence: (1) an analysis
of a corpus of 55 problem solving dialogues, and (2) experimental simulations
of collaborative problem solving dialogues in an experimental world,
Design-World, where we parameterize task requirements, agents' resources and
communicative strategies.
