Types of Deliberation

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...

A Logic of Deliberation

Deliberation typically involves the formation of a plan or intention from a set of values and beliefs. I suggest that deliberation, or “practical reasoning,” is a form of normative reasoning and that the understanding and construction of reasoning systems that can deliberate and act intentionally presupposes a theory of normative reasoning. The language and semantics of a deontic logic is used ...

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

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...

Deliberation as Interactive Reasoning

Most formal models of deliberative democracy posit actors who want to guide a collective choice. This assumption stands in stark contrast to deliberative democratic theory as it was originally developed. The baseline non-formal model of this theory is the ideal speech situation, in which actors aim to understand and be understood, rather than to manipulate the outcome (Cohen 1989, Habermas 1990...