Cooperativity is usually seen as a central concept in the pragmatics of dialogue. There are a number of accounts of dialogue performance and interpretation that require some notion of cooperation or collaboration as part of the explanatory mechanism of communication. For instance, Grice’s cooperativity principle and associated maxims are used to explain conversational implicature (Grice, 1975)....

Before signing electronic contracts, a rational agent should estimate the expected utilities of these contracts and calculate the violation risks related to them. In order to perform such pre-signing procedures, this agent has to be capable of computing a policy taking into account the norms and sanctions in the contracts. In relation to this, the contribution of this work is threefold. First, ...

The use of rational agents for modelling real world problems has both been heavily investigated and become well accepted, with BDI (Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions) Logic being a widely used architecture to represent and reason about rational agency. However, in the real world, we often have to deal with different levels of confidence in the beliefs we hold, desires we have, and intentions tha...

This paper presents and discusses a novel approach to indeterministic belief revision. An indeterministic belief revision operator assumes that, when an agent is confronted with a new piece of information, it can revise its belief base in more than one way. We define a rational agent not only in terms of what it believes, as often assumed in belief revision, but also of what it ought or is obli...

Why Are Married Men Working So Much? Home Production, Household Bargaining and Per-Capita Hours Empirical patterns of labor supply at the micro level tend to reject the unitary model assumption implicit in most macro theories, where households are the deemed to be rational agents. This paper examines the rise in per-capita labor since 1975 and asks how the inclusion of bargaining between spouse...

Abstract. We consider a manager, who allocates some fixed total payment amount between N rational agents in order to maximize the aggregate production. The profit of i-th agent is the difference between the compensation (reward) obtained from the manager and the production cost. We compare (i) the normative compensation scheme, where the manager enforces the agents to follow an optimal cooperat...

A rational agent adopts (or changes) its goals when new information (beliefs) becomes available or its desires (e.g., tasks it is supposed to carry out) change. In this paper we propose a nonconventional approach for adopting goals which takes the degree of trust in the sources of information into account. Beliefs, desires, and goals, as a consequence, are gradual. Incoming information may be a...

The law of the few refers to the following empirical phenomenon: in social groups a very small subset of individuals invests in collecting information while the rest of the group invests in forming connections with this select few. In many instances, there are no observable differences in characteristics between those who invest in information and those who invest in forming connections. This p...

We propose a general framework to represent changes in the mental state of a rational agent due to the acquisition of new information and/or to the arising of new desires; fundamental postulates and properties of the function which generates the goal set are also provided.

By James C. Cox and Stephen C. Hayne* Abstract Both mainstream economics and its critics have focused on models of individual rational agents even though most important decisions are made by small groups. Little systematic work has been done to study the behavior of small groups as decision-making agents in markets and other strategic games. This may limit the relevance of both economics and it...