Group Intention = Social Choice + Commitment

A collaborative group is commonly defined as a set of agents, which share information and coordinate activities while working towards a common goal. How do groups decide which are their common goals and what to intend? According to the much cited theory of Cohen and Levesque, an agent intends g if it has chosen to pursue goal g and it has committed itself to making g happen. Following the same line of reasoning, a group intention should be a collectively chosen goal with commitment. The literature often considers a collective goal to be one of those individual goals that are shared by all members. This approach presumes that a group goal is also an individual one and that the agents can act as a group if they share the beliefs relevant to this goal. This is not necessarily the case. We construct an abstract framework for groups in which common goals are determined by social choice. Our framework uses judgment aggregation to choose a group goal and a multi-modal multi-agent logic to define commitment and revision strategies for the group intentions.