(WP 2016-03) Economics, Neuroeconomics, and the Problem of Identity

This paper reviews the debate in economics over neuroeconomics’ contribution to economics. It distinguishes majority and minority views, argues that this debate has been framed by mainstream economics’ conception of itself as an isolated science, and argues that this framing has put off the agenda in economics issues such as individual identity that are increasingly important in connection with the social and historical context of economic explanations in a changing complex world. The paper first discusses how the debate over neuroeconomics has been limited to the question of what information from other sciences might be employed in economics. It then goes on to the individual identity issue, and discusses how economics’ top-down, closed character generates a circular individual identity conception, while bottom-up, open character of psychology and neuroscience, and their continual concern with the changing relation between theory and evidence, has produced four competing individual identity conceptions in neuroeconomic research

A Cognitive Model for Conversation

International audienceThis paper describes a symbolic model of rational action and decision making to support analysing dialogue. The model approximates principles of behaviour from game theory, and its proof theory makes Gricean principles of cooperativity derivable when the agents’ preferences align

Production/maintenance cooperative scheduling using multi-agents and fuzzy logic

Within companies, production is directly concerned with the manufacturing schedule, but other services like sales, maintenance, purchasing or workforce management should also have an influence on this schedule. These services often have together a hierarchical relationship, i.e. the leading function (most of the time sales or production) generates constraints defining the framework within which the other functions have to satisfy their own objectives. We show how the multi-agent paradigm, often used in scheduling for its ability to distribute decision-making, can also provide a framework for making several functions cooperate in the schedule performance. Production and maintenance have been chosen as an example: having common resources (the machines), their activities are actually often conflicting. We show how to use a fuzzy logic in order to model the temporal degrees of freedom of the two functions, and show that this approach may allow one to obtain a schedule that provides a better compromise between the satisfaction of the respective objectives of the two functions

Partner Selection for the Emergence of Cooperation in Multi-Agent Systems Using Reinforcement Learning

Social dilemmas have been widely studied to explain how humans are able to cooperate in society. Considerable effort has been invested in designing artificial agents for social dilemmas that incorporate explicit agent motivations that are chosen to favor coordinated or cooperative responses. The prevalence of this general approach points towards the importance of achieving an understanding of both an agent's internal design and external environment dynamics that facilitate cooperative behavior. In this paper, we investigate how partner selection can promote cooperative behavior between agents who are trained to maximize a purely selfish objective function. Our experiments reveal that agents trained with this dynamic learn a strategy that retaliates against defectors while promoting cooperation with other agents resulting in a prosocial society.Comment:

Realising Team-Working in the Field: An Agent-based Approach

Multi-agent systems technology is applied to enable co-operation between mobile workers in the field, minimising user intervention and increasing reachability. A component-based approach is taken to simplify the management of deployed co-operation services. A Personal Assistant running on a mobile device is introduced to show how an intelligent and autonomous agent can increase the utility of users during workforce co-operation processes. Finally, a real world trial of the technology by network installation and maintenance engineers in the UK is described. Some technical issues revealed during the trial are discussed, as is the impact of the technology on the business process