Peer designed agents: Just reflect or also affect?

Peer Designed Agent (PDA), computer agents developed by non-experts, is an emerging technology, widely advocated in recent literature for the purpose of replacing people in simulations and investigating human behavior. Its main premise is that the strategy programmed into these agents reliably reflect, to some extent, the behavior used by the programmer in real life. In this paper we show that PDA development has an important side effect that has not been addressed to date - the process, that merely attempts to capture one's strategy, is also likely to affect the developer's strategy. The phenomenon is demonstrated experimentally via the penetration detection game, using different setting variations. This result has many implications concerning the appropriate design of PDA-based simulations, and the validness of using PDAs for studying individual decision making.