For a while now I've been thinking about the difference between "top-down" agents which pursue a single goal, and "bottom-up" agents which are built around compromises between many goals/subagents.

I've now decided that the frame of "centralized" vs "distributed" agents is a better way of capturing this idea, since there's no inherent "up" or "down" direction in coalitions. It's also more continuous.

Credit to @Scott Garrabrant, who something like this point to me a while back, in a way which I didn't grok at the time.