New Perspectives on Games and Interaction

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 2007 colloquium on new perspectives on games and interaction at the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences in Amsterdam. The purpose of the colloquium was to clarify the uses of the concepts of game theory, and to identify promising new directions. This important collection testifies to the growing importance of game theory as a tool to capture the concepts of strategy, interaction, argumentation, communication, cooperation and competition. Also, it provides evidence for the richness of game theory and for its impressive and growing application

Engaging With The Future: A Historical Investigation of Greenpeace

This dissertation concentrates on the case of organizations that engage with the future with the intent to shape it. Engaging with the future implies identifying and pursuing opportunities aligned with one’s vision for the future and that have the potential to enact the environment. My specific focus is on the properties that can make the organization more effective at pursuing its objectives, to understand why these properties are important and how they can enhance an organization’s ability to engage with the future. The study builds on the extreme case of Greenpeace International, an organization that dedicates its actions to the enactment of a particular vision for the future. This vision implies the protection of the environment and the prevention of the depletion of species. The case is based on historiography. It uses historical documentation from Greenpeace International archives to reconstruct the intentions, structures, processes, and practices of the organization as well as the rationale behind its actions. The historical documentation is analyzed through periodization as well as through analytic constructs aligned with the process of engaging with the future. My study highlights the importance of the properties of flexibility (cognitive, operational, and financial), stability (attentional, structural, and in processes), and diversity (institutional, structural, and in the portfolio of action alternatives). What the research demonstrates is that flexibility, stability, and diversity are important to identify, pursue, and seize opportunities aligned with one’s vision for the future. Implications for organization theory, strategic management, and international management are discussed

Computational Complexity of Strong Admissibility for Abstract Dialectical Frameworks

Abstract dialectical frameworks (ADFs) have been introduced as a formalism for modeling and evaluating argumentation allowing general logical satisfaction conditions. Different criteria used to settle the acceptance of arguments arecalled semantics. Semantics of ADFs have so far mainly been defined based on the concept of admissibility. Recently, the notion of strong admissibility has been introduced for ADFs. In the current work we study the computational complexityof the following reasoning tasks under strong admissibility semantics. We address 1. the credulous/skeptical decision problem; 2. the verification problem; 3. the strong justification problem; and 4. the problem of finding a smallest witness of strong justification of a queried argument

Control room agents : an information-theoretic approach

In this thesis, a particular class of agent is singled out for examination. In order to provide a guiding metaphor, we speak of control room agents. Our focus is on rational decision- making by such agents, where the circumstances obtaining are such that rationality is bounded. Control room agents, whether human or non-human, need to reason and act in a changing environment with only limited information available to them. Determining the current state of the environment is a central concern for control room agents if they are to reason and act sensibly. A control room agent cannot plan its actions without having an internal representation (epistemic state) of its environment, and cannot make rational decisions unless this representation, to some level of accuracy, reflects the state of its environment. The focus of this thesis is on three aspects regarding the epistemic functioning of a control room agent: 1. How should the epistemic state of a control room agent be represented in order to facilitate logical analysis? 2. How should a control room agent change its epistemic state upon receiving new information? 3. How should a control room agent combine available information from different sources? In describing the class of control room agents as first-order intentional systems hav- ing both informational and motivational attitudes, an agent-oriented view is adopted. The central construct used in the information-theoretic approach, which is qualitative in nature, is the concept of a templated ordering. Representing the epistemic state of a control room agent by a (special form of) tem- plated ordering signals a departure from the many approaches in which only the beliefs of an agent are represented. Templated orderings allow for the representation of both knowledge and belief. A control room agent changes its epistemic state according to a proposed epistemic change algorithm, which allows the agent to select between two well-established forms of belief change operations, namely, belief revision and belief update. The combination of (possibly conflicting) information from different sources has re- ceived a lot of attention in recent years. Using templated orderings for the semantic representation of information, a new family of purely qualitative merging operations is developed.School of ComputingPh. D. (Computer Science