Toward a relational concept of uncertainty: about knowing too little, knowing too differently, and accepting not to know

Uncertainty of late has become an increasingly important and controversial topic in water resource management, and natural resources management in general. Diverse managing goals, changing environmental conditions, conflicting interests, and lack of predictability are some of the characteristics that decision makers have to face. This has resulted in the application and development of strategies such as adaptive management, which proposes flexibility and capability to adapt to unknown conditions as a way of dealing with uncertainties. However, this shift in ideas about managing has not always been accompanied by a general shift in the way uncertainties are understood and handled. To improve this situation, we believe it is necessary to recontextualize uncertainty in a broader way¿relative to its role, meaning, and relationship with participants in decision making¿because it is from this understanding that problems and solutions emerge. Under this view, solutions do not exclusively consist of eliminating or reducing uncertainty, but of reframing the problems as such so that they convey a different meaning. To this end, we propose a relational approach to uncertainty analysis. Here, we elaborate on this new conceptualization of uncertainty, and indicate some implications of this view for strategies for dealing with uncertainty in water management. We present an example as an illustration of these concepts. Key words: adaptive management; ambiguity; frames; framing; knowledge relationship; multiple knowledge frames; natural resource management; negotiation; participation; social learning; uncertainty; water managemen

Human-Agent Decision-making: Combining Theory and Practice

Extensive work has been conducted both in game theory and logic to model strategic interaction. An important question is whether we can use these theories to design agents for interacting with people? On the one hand, they provide a formal design specification for agent strategies. On the other hand, people do not necessarily adhere to playing in accordance with these strategies, and their behavior is affected by a multitude of social and psychological factors. In this paper we will consider the question of whether strategies implied by theories of strategic behavior can be used by automated agents that interact proficiently with people. We will focus on automated agents that we built that need to interact with people in two negotiation settings: bargaining and deliberation. For bargaining we will study game-theory based equilibrium agents and for argumentation we will discuss logic-based argumentation theory. We will also consider security games and persuasion games and will discuss the benefits of using equilibrium based agents.Comment: In Proceedings TARK 2015, arXiv:1606.0729

The first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010)

Motivated by the challenges of bilateral negotiations between people and automated agents we organized the first automated negotiating agents competition (ANAC 2010). The purpose of the competition is to facilitate the research in the area bilateral multi-issue closed negotiation. The competition was based on the Genius environment, which is a General Environment for Negotiation with Intelligent multi-purpose Usage Simulation. The first competition was held in conjunction with the Ninth International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS-10) and was comprised of seven teams. This paper presents an overview of the competition, as well as general and contrasting approaches towards negotiation strategies that were adopted by the participants of the competition. Based on analysis in post--tournament experiments, the paper also attempts to provide some insights with regard to effective approaches towards the design of negotiation strategies

Towards a theory of deception

This paper proposes an equilibrium approach to deception where deception is defined to be the process by which actions are chosen to induce erroneous inferences so as to take advantage of them. Specifically, we introduce a framework with boundedly rational players in which agents make inferences based on a coarse information about others' behaviors: Agents are assumed to know only the average reaction function of other agents over groups of situations. Equilibrium requires that the coarse information available to agents is correct, and that inferences and optimizations are made based on the simplest theories compatible with the available information. We illustrate the phenomenon of deception and how reputation concerns may arise even in zero-sum games in which there is no value to commitment. We further illustrate how the possibility of deception affects standard economic insights through a number of stylized applications including a monitoring game and two simple bargaining games. The approach can be viewed as formalizing into a game theoretic setting a well documented bias in social psychology, the Fundamental Attribution Error.deception ; game theory ; fundamental attribution error

Common Knowledge and Interactive Behaviors: A Survey

This paper surveys the notion of common knowledge taken from game theory and computer science. It studies and illustrates more generally the effects of interactive knowledge in economic and social problems. First of all, common knowledge is shown to be a central concept and often a necessary condition for coordination, equilibrium achievement, agreement, and consensus. We present how common knowledge can be practically generated, for example, by particular advertisements or leadership. Secondly, we prove that common knowledge can be harmful, essentially in various cooperation and negotiation problems, and more generally when there are con icts of interest. Finally, in some asymmetric relationships, common knowledge is shown to be preferable for some players, but not for all. The ambiguous welfare effects of higher-order knowledge on interactive behaviors leads us to analyze the role of decentralized communication in order to deal with dynamic or endogenous information structures.Interactive knowledge, common knowledge, information structure, communication.

An Analysis of the Insertion of Virtual Players in GMABS Methodology Using the Vip-JogoMan Prototype

The GMABS (Games and Multi-Agent-Based Simulation) methodology was created from the integration of RPG and MABS techniques. This methodology links the dynamic capacity of MABS (Multi-Agent-Based Simulation) and the discussion and learning capacity of RPG (Role-Playing Games). Using GMABS, we have developed two prototypes in the natural resources management domain. The first prototype, called JogoMan (Adamatti et. al, 2005), is a paper-based game: all players need to be physically present in the same place and time, and there is a minimum needed number of participants to play the game. In order to avoid this constraint, we have built a second prototype, called ViP-JogoMan (Adamatti et. al, 2007), which is an extension of the first one. This second game enables the insertion of virtual players that can substitute some real players in the game. These virtual players can partially mime real behaviors and capture autonomy, social abilities, reaction and adaptation of the real players. We have chosen the BDI architecture to model these virtual players, since its paradigm is based on folk psychology; hence, its core concepts easily map the language that people use to describe their reasoning and actions in everyday life. ViP-JogoMan is a computer-based game, in which people play via Web, players can be in different places and it does not have a hard constraint regarding the minimum number of real players. Our aim in this paper is to present some test results obtained with both prototypes, as well as to present a preliminary discussion on how the insertion of virtual players has affected the game results.Role-Playing Games, Multi-Agent Based Simulation, Natural Resources, Virtual Players