143,939 research outputs found
Mechanisms for Automated Negotiation in State Oriented Domains
This paper lays part of the groundwork for a domain theory of negotiation,
that is, a way of classifying interactions so that it is clear, given a domain,
which negotiation mechanisms and strategies are appropriate. We define State
Oriented Domains, a general category of interaction. Necessary and sufficient
conditions for cooperation are outlined. We use the notion of worth in an
altered definition of utility, thus enabling agreements in a wider class of
joint-goal reachable situations. An approach is offered for conflict
resolution, and it is shown that even in a conflict situation, partial
cooperative steps can be taken by interacting agents (that is, agents in
fundamental conflict might still agree to cooperate up to a certain point). A
Unified Negotiation Protocol (UNP) is developed that can be used in all types
of encounters. It is shown that in certain borderline cooperative situations, a
partial cooperative agreement (i.e., one that does not achieve all agents'
goals) might be preferred by all agents, even though there exists a rational
agreement that would achieve all their goals. Finally, we analyze cases where
agents have incomplete information on the goals and worth of other agents.
First we consider the case where agents' goals are private information, and we
analyze what goal declaration strategies the agents might adopt to increase
their utility. Then, we consider the situation where the agents' goals (and
therefore stand-alone costs) are common knowledge, but the worth they attach to
their goals is private information. We introduce two mechanisms, one 'strict',
the other 'tolerant', and analyze their affects on the stability and efficiency
of negotiation outcomes.Comment: See http://www.jair.org/ for any accompanying file
Bayesianism, Infinite Decisions, and Binding
We pose and resolve several vexing decision theoretic puzzles. Some are variants of existing puzzles, such as âTrumpedâ (Arntzenius and McCarthy 1997), âRouble troubleâ (Arntzenius and Barrett 1999), âThe airtight Dutch bookâ (McGee 1999), and âThe two envelopes puzzleâ (Broome 1995). Others are new. A unified resolution of the puzzles shows that Dutch book arguments have no force in infinite cases. It thereby provides evidence that reasonable utility functions may be unbounded and that reasonable credence functions need not be countably additive. The resolution also shows that when infinitely many decisions are involved, the difference between making the decisions simultaneously and making them sequentially can be the difference between riches and ruin. Finally, the resolution reveals a new way in which the ability to make binding commitments can save perfectly rational agents from sure losses
Paul Taylors Biocentric Ethics: A Survey of Contemporary Environmental Conflicts
This work is on Paul Taylors Biocentric Ethics: A Survey of Contemporary Environmental Conflicts. When we accept the concept of biocentrism there is bound to exist conflicts between interests and cultural values of humans and the well-being of nonhuman living beings. These conflicts as we shall see need fair resolution principles because they are equal competing claims. Thus, the concept of equality here deals with the fact already established. This work exposes that both humans and nonhuman living beings of the wild have inherent worth of their own, which deserve respect and consideration. In other words, they both have rightâ to pursue and attain their own ends without hindrance of any sort
Now or never: negotiating efficiently with unknown counterparts
We define a new protocol rule, Now or Never (NoN), for bilateral negotiation processes which allows self-motivated competitive agents to efficiently carry out multi-variable negotiations with remote untrusted parties, where privacy is a major concern and agents know nothing about their opponent. By building on the geometric concepts of convexity and convex hull, NoN ensures a continuous progress of the negotiation, thus neutralising malicious or inefficient opponents. In par- ticular, NoN allows an agent to derive in a finite number of steps, and independently of the behaviour of the opponent, that there is no hope to find an agreement. To be able to make such an inference, the interested agent may rely on herself only, still keeping the highest freedom in the choice of her strategy.
We also propose an actual NoN-compliant strategy for an automated agent and evaluate the computational feasibility of the overall approach on instances of practical size
Variation in Boilerplate: Rational Design or Random Mutation?
Standard contract doctrine presumes that sophisticated parties choose their terminology carefully because they want courts or counterparts to understand what they intended. The implication of this âRational Designâ model of rational behavior is that courts should pay careful attention to the precise phrasing of contracts. Using a study of the sovereign bond market, we examine the Rational Design model as applied to standard-form contracting. In NML v. Argentina, federal courts in New York attached importance to the precise phrasing of the boilerplate contracts at issue. The industry promptly condemned the decision for a supposedly erroneous interpretation of a variant of a hoary boilerplate clause. Utilizing data on how contracting practices responded to the decision, we ask whether the market response indicates that parties in fact intended for the small variations in their contract language to embody a particular meaning. We find the data supports a model closer to random mutation rather than rational design
Multi-Agents Systems and Territory: Concepts, Methods and Applications
This paper analyses the multi-agents systems that are now considered the best tool to simulate and study real world. We review the main characteristics of a multi-agents system, namely interactions and cooperations of agents, communications and behaviours between them and finally the schedule of actions and jobs assignment to agents. The multi-agents system approach is increasingly applied in social and economic sciences; so we study mainly the territorial applications. In these applications new characteristics arise from the consideration of territory (land and space where the agents live or territory as an agent in itself, that evolves in the time). We study possible new applications of multi-agents applied to the territory (for instance, to define town planning policies or to locate dangerous facilities). Furthermore we study new tools to make operational multi-agents systems (mainly Swarm, the toolkit of Santa Fe Institute). With Swarm we present two kind of territorial applications: with located agents (fixed in space) and with not located agents (moving in the space). Finally we show the results of these applications.
On the algebraic numbers computable by some generalized Ehrenfest urns
This article deals with some stochastic population protocols, motivated by
theoretical aspects of distributed computing. We modelize the problem by a
large urn of black and white balls from which at every time unit a fixed number
of balls are drawn and their colors are changed according to the number of
black balls among them. When the time and the number of balls both tend to
infinity the proportion of black balls converges to an algebraic number. We
prove that, surprisingly enough, not every algebraic number can be "computed"
this way
The formation of share market prices under heterogeneous beliefs and common knowledge
Financial economic models often assume that investors know (or agree on) the
fundamental value of the shares of the firm, easing the passage from the
individual to the collective dimension of the financial system generated by the
Share Exchange over time. Our model relaxes that heroic assumption of one
unique "true value" and deals with the formation of share market prices through
the dynamic formation of individual and social opinions (or beliefs) based upon
a fundamental signal of economic performance and position of the firm, the
forecast revision by heterogeneous individual investors, and their social mood
or sentiment about the ongoing state of the market pricing process. Market
clearing price formation is then featured by individual and group dynamics that
make its collective dimension irreducible to its individual level. This dynamic
holistic approach can be applied to better understand the market exuberance
generated by the Share Exchange over time.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure
The fundamental problem of command : plan and compliance in a partially centralised economy
When a principal gives an order to an agent and advances resources for its implementation, the temptations for the agent to shirk or steal from the principal rather than comply constitute the fundamental problem of command. Historically, partially centralised command economies enforced compliance in various ways, assisted by nesting the fundamental problem of exchange within that of command. The Soviet economy provides some relevant data. The Soviet command system combined several enforcement mechanisms in an equilibrium that shifted as agents learned and each mechanism's comparative costs and benefits changed. When the conditions for an equilibrium disappeared, the system collapsed.Comparative Economic Studies (2005) 47, 296â314. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ces.810011
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