Definition 3.1 A transfer-of-control strategy is a pre-defined, conditional sequence of two types of actions: (i) actions to transfer decision-making control (e.g., from an agent to a user or other agents, or vice versa) and (ii) actions to change an agent's pre-specified coordination constraints with team members, aimed at minimizing miscoordination costs.

The agent executes a transfer-of-control strategy by performing the specified actions in sequence, transferring control to the specified entity and changing coordination as required, until some point in time when the entity currently in control exercises that control and makes the decision. Considering multi-step strategies allows an agent to exploit decisionmaking sources considered too risky to exploit without the possibility of retaking control. For example, control could be transferred to a very capable but not always available decision maker then taken back if the decision was not made before serious miscoordination occurred.

More complex strategies, potentially involving several coordination changes, give the agent the option to try several decision-making sources or to be more flexible in getting input from high-quality decision makers. As a result, transfer-of-control strategies specifically allow an agent to avoid costly errors, such as those enumerated in the previous section. 3 Given an AA problem instance, (A, α, ρ, χ, d, E), agent A  can transfer decision-making control for a decision d  to any entity e i E E i and we denote such a transfer-of-control action with the symbol representing the entity, i.e., transferring control to ej is denoted as ei. When the agent transfers decision-making control, it may stipulate a limit on the time that it will wait for a response from that entity. To capture this additional stipulation, we denote transfer-of-control actions with this time limit, e.g., e i ( t ) represents that e i has decision-making control for a maximum time of t .  Such an action has two possible outcomes:
either e i responds before time t and makes the decision, or it does not respond and decision remains unmade at time t . In addition, the agent has some mechanism by which it d can change coordination constraints (denoted D ) to change the expected timing of the decision. The D action changes the coordination constraints, ~, between team members. The action has an associated value, Dystue: which specifies its magnitude (i.e., how much the D has alleviated the temporal pressure), and a cost, D cost, which specifies the price paid for making the change. We can concatenate such actions to specify a complete transferof-control strategy. For instance, the strategy H(5)A would specify that the agent first relinquishes control and asks entity H (denoting the Human user). If the user responds with a decision within five minutes, then there is no need to go further. If not, then the agent proceeds to the next transfer-of-control action in the sequence. In this example, this next action, A, specifies that the agent itself make the decision and complete the task.

No further transfers of control occur in this case. We can define the space of all possible strategies with the following regular expression:
S = (E × R)((E × R) + D)*
(1)
where ( E × R ) is all possible combinations of entity and maximum time. For readability, we will frequently omit the time specifications from the transfer-ofcontrol actions and instead write just the order in which the agent transfers control among