Agent skill · vasilyu1983
foundations-team-theory
Team-theory primitives for cooperative multi-agent decisions, subagent allocation, communication value, Dec-POMDPs, and decentralized control. Use when organizing agents.
What it needs
About 11k tokens when loaded.
What this skill does
Team Theory Foundations 10 canonical team-theory primitives for cooperative multi-agent decision problems — agents share a payoff but each sees a different slice of the world. Game theory handles strategic conflict; decision theory handles solo choice under uncertainty; team theory handles the regime in between, which is exactly where subagents and orchestrated AI agents operate. The field was founded by Jacob Marschak (1955) and formalized by Roy Radner (1962). It is the formal basis for: when to centralize a decision, what each agent must observe, when communication pays for itself, and why decentralized teams can be optimal even with free communication channels. Modern multi-agent reinforcement learning (Dec-POMDPs, MARL) is its computational descendant. When to Apply Apply team-theory when: Multiple agents with shared payoff but partitioned observations (the canonical subagent setting) Designing what each subagent sees vs. what is centralized Choosing between centralized orchestrator, decentralized swarm, and hierarchical structures Costing communication: is it worth the latency / token / coordination overhead? Building agent teams where role specialization matters (each agent owns a different observation lane) Multi-agent RL or Dec-POMDP problem framing Skip and use simpler alternatives when: Agents have divergent incentives → use foundations-game-theory (mechanism design, auctions, debates) Single agent / single-shot decision under uncertainty → use foundations-decision-theory Communication itself is the bottleneck on a known structure → use foundations-information-theory (channel capacity) The problem is recursive control of a viable system, not a one-shot team decision → use foundations-cybernetics-vsm All agents see the same information — there is no team problem; centralize trivially Contents Quick Reference Primitive Index Formal Supporting Theory Anti-Patterns Decision Checklist Composition Recipes Workflow ASCII Flow Navigation Related Skills Fact-Check …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills vasilyu1983/foundations-team-theory