Moral Guilt : An Agent-Based Model Analysis

International audienceIn this article we analyze the influence of a concrete moral emotion (i.e. moral guilt) on strategic decision making. We present a normal form Prisoner’s Dilemma with a moral component. We assume that agents evaluate the game’s outcomes with respect to their ideality degree (i.e. how much a given outcome conforms to the player’s moral values), based on two proposed notions on ethical preferences: Harsanyi’s and Rawls’. Based on such game, we construct and agent-based model of moral guilt, where the intensity of an agent’s guilt feeling plays a determinant role in her course of action. Results for both constructions of ideality are analyzed

A logical analysis of responsibility attribution : emotions, individuals and collectives

International audienceThe aim of this article is to provide a logical analysis of the concept of responsibility attribution; that is, how agents ascribe responsibility about the consequences of actions, either to themselves or to other agents. The article is divided in two parts. The first part investigates the importance of the concept of responsibility attribution for emotion theory in general and, in particular, for the theory of attribution emotions such as guilt, pride, moral approval and moral disapproval. The second part explores the collective dimension of responsibility attribution and attribution emotions, namely the concepts of collective responsibility and collective guilt. The proposed analysis is based on an extension of the logic STIT (the logic of ‘Seeing To It That’) with three different types of knowledge and common knowledge modal operators depending on the time of choice: before one’s choice, after one’s choice but before knowing the choices of other agents, and after the choices of all agents have become public. Decidability of the satisfiability problem of the logic is studied in the article

Formal Representation of Water Withdrawal Policies for Integrated Impact Assessment

International audienceThe regulation of water use and water management has evolved considerably in recent years. The evolution of water regulatory systems includes the design of new management policies, which could benefit from ex-ante comparative impact assessments with regard to those of current or past practices. To this aim, the MAELIA project develops an integrated modelling and simulation platform for the assessment of alternative water management policies, especially during low-water crisis in the Adour-Garonne basin (South-West region of France). The development of such an integrated assessment and modelling platform requires the consideration and integration of many entities and processes involved in the system under consideration - water resources and flows, agricultural structures and activities, state and evolution of land cover and land use, etc. This article focuses on the formal representation of two alternative options regarding the choice of water withdrawal policy, which are likely to have considerable impacts on the whole socio-hydro-system s: management by rate of flow (currently applied); and management by volume quotas (alternative to be assessed). Furthermore, the article presents a conceptual framework for the integrated modelling of such social-ecological systems together with graphical notations for models' representation

The MAELIA multi-agent platform for integrated assessment of low-water management issues

International audienceThe MAELIA project is developing an agent-based modeling and simulation platform to study the environmental, economic and social impacts of various regulations regarding water use and water management in combination with climate change. It is applied to the case of the French Adour-Garonne Basin, which is the most concerned in France by water scarcity during the low-water period. An integrated approach has been chosen to model this social-ecological system: the model combines spatiotemporal models of ecologic (e.g. rainfall and temperature changes, water flow and plant growth) and socio-economic (e.g. farmer decision-making process, management of low-water flow, demography, land use and land cover changes) processes and sub-models of cognitive sharing among agents (e.g. weather forecast, normative constraints on behaviors

Impact Assessment Modeling of Low-Water Management Policy

International audienceWe briefly present the main steps involved in designing and developing a platform for the numerical simulation of environmental and social impacts of the implementation of new environmental norms related to low-water management in France (MAELIA Project: multi-agents for environmental norms impact assessment). Some results are highlighted concerning in particular the structure of the underlying low-water management model and the process and agents' activity modeling

A dynamic view on normative behavior : agent-based models of law

Defence date: 6 June 2011Examining Board: Prof. Giovanni Sartor, European University Institute (Supervisor), Prof. Cristiano Castelfranchi, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, Prof. Jorge Nieto, Public University of Navarre, Prof. Sven Steinmo, European University InstituteWhen dealing with norm compliance, we can talk about three different layers. First, law's addressees consider their potential legal liability in case they don't abide the norm. Monetary sanctions, incentives and other deterrence measures are essential. Second, the morally persuasive role that is inherent to law, `it's the right thing to do'. Sometimes the `threat' of punishment is not the main reason for conformity, and non-pecuniary considerations must be taken into account. Individuals belong to communities, and share general respect for a system of values and norms. Norms are seen as a re ection of the set of behaviors that are desirable or legitimate in the shared view of society, and whose violation elicits at least informal disapproval. This socio-cultural aspect of law has deep implications in terms of policy: instilling a norm in countries where it currently does not prevail nor is culturally accepted may be a daunting task. This leads us to the third aspect of normative behavior proposed in this manuscript: the procedural aspect. Once the norm is established and the efficacy of its deterrence methods evaluated, authorities must find an adequate way to deal with cases of possible liability resulting from non-compliance. In order to disentangle the real nature and dynamics of normativity, the first issue requires finding the proper way to study the development of such phenomena: is it a spontaneous process over which individuals have little control, and which depends on psycho-cognitive human characteristics, or is it a more complex phenomenon? My suggestion is that it should be con- ceived within a social learning approach, emphasizing the cognitive out- comes of cultural learning. Furthermore, I believe that an interdisciplinary approach to the issue, mainly based on theories of social and customary norms and agent-based modeling, could offer fresh new insights

Why Are Lawyers Nice or Nasty? Insights From Agent-Based Modeling

All substantive areas of law, with no exception, have a common concern for the processes by which legal disputes get resolved. Naturally, the success of any particular litigation strategy in a legal dispute depends on several factors, such as procedural costs, the judges' accuracy and, most importantly, the litigation strategy followed by the counterpart. Previous work within the legal scholarship has focused on the outcomes of the litigation process and their concordance with the merits of the claims presented by the parties. In contrast, in this paper, we adopt a dynamic view of the legal system as a whole. In order to do this, we propose an evolutionary point of view. That is, we assume that the most successful litigation strategies at a certain time are more likely to be followed in the future, so the prevalence of different strategies in the system will generally change over time. Importantly, this change in the frequency of litigation strategies in the legal system will, in turn, affect the relative success of each litigation strategy, thus creating a double feedback loop between prevalence and success of litigation strategies, which we aim to explore. Furthermore, we will compare the results drawn from our model with the ones proposed by the empirical literature on the topic. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to offer a novel approach to study legal disputes, looking at the whole litigation system as a single entity that evolves through time. In particular, we focus on cases of medical liability, and use agent-based simulation to provide a dynamic view of how various factors affect the type of litigation strategies that are successful and prevail in a certain judicial context

A Dynamic View of Litigation. Agent-Based Simulation Insights on Medical Liability Cases

All substantive areas of law with no exception have a common concern for the processes by which legal disputes get resolved. Naturally, the success of any particular litigation strategy in a legal dispute depends on a number of factors. Examples of influential factors are procedural costs, the judge’s accuracy and, most importantly, the litigation strategy followed by the counterpart in dispute. Previous work has focused on analysing legal disputes individually, thus providing an answer to the question: What litigation strategy may be most appropriate when confronted with a particular counterpart’s strategy? The problem, of course, is that the counterpart’s strategy is rarely known in advance. In contrast, in this paper we adopt a dynamic view of the legal system as a whole. To do this, we assume that the most successful litigation strategies at a certain time are more likely to be followed in the future, so the prevalence of different strategies in the system will generally change in time. Importantly, this change in the frequency of litigation strategies in the legal system will in turn affect the relative success of each litigation strategy, thus creating a double feedback loop between prevalence and success of litigation strategies, which we aim to explore in this paper. Thus, the subject main purpose of this paper is to offer a novel approach to study legal disputes, looking at the whole litigation system as a single entity that evolves through time. In particular, we focus on cases of medical liability, and use agent-based simulation to provide a dynamic view of how various factors, such as the magnitude of legal expenses and the accuracy of the judicial system, affect the type of litigation strategies that are successful and prevail in a certain judicial context

WHY ARE LAWYERS NICE OR NASTY? INSIGHTS FROM AGENT-BASED MODELING

All substantive areas of law, with no exception, have a common concern for the processes by which legal disputes get resolved. Naturally, the success of any particular litigation strategy in a legal dispute depends on several factors, such as procedural costs, the judges' accuracy and, most importantly, the litigation strategy followed by the counterpart. Previous work within the legal scholarship has focused on the outcomes of the litigation process and their concordance with the merits of the claims presented by the parties.In contrast, in this paper, we adopt a dynamic view of the legal system as a whole. In order to do this, we propose an evolutionary point of view. That is, we assume that the most successful litigation strategies at a certain time are more likely to be followed in the future, so the prevalence of different strategies in the system will generally change over time. Importantly, this change in the frequency of litigation strategies in the legal system will, in turn, affect the relative success of each litigation strategy, thus creating a double feedback loop between prevalence and success of litigation strategies, which we aim to explore. Furthermore, we will compare the results drawn from our model with the ones proposed by the empirical literature on the topic.Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to offer a novel approach to study legal disputes, looking at the whole litigation system as a single entity that evolves through time. In particular, we focus on cases of medical liability, and use agent-based simulation to provide a dynamic view of how various factors affect the type of litigation strategies that are successful and prevail in a certain judicial context.Agent-based simulation, litigation strategies, medical liability, concordant outcomes, judicial framework