Deliberation in Democracy’s Dark Times

Light in dark times.

Recent world events have once again reinforced my belief that we are indeed very fortunate. In March, we watched helplessly as friends, family, and colleagues in Japan were devastated by earthquakes and tsunamis, and continue to watch the saga of a nuclear disaster unfold. Not so long ago, we witnessed the devastation in Haiti, in Australia, and again in New Zealand, as thousands of lives were ...

Untimeliness and Punctuality: Critical Theory in Dark Times

Modeling Deliberation in Teamwork

Cooperation in multi-agent systems essentially hinges on appropriate communication. This paper shows how to model communication in teamwork within TEAMLOG, the first multi-modal framework wholly capturing a methodology for working together. Taking off from the dialogue theory ofWalton and Krabbe, the paper focuses on deliberation, the main type of dialogue during team planning. We provide a fou...

Sequential Deliberation

We present a dynamic model of sequential information acquisition by a heterogeneous committee. At each date agents decide whether to continue deliberation, generating costly information, or stop and take a binding vote yielding a decision. For homogeneous committees, the model is a reinterpretation of the classic Wald (1947) sequential testing of statistical hypotheses. In heterogeneous committ...

“Talking It Out”: Deliberation With Others versus Deliberation Within