Irrevocable commitments (ICs) are undertakings by target-firm blockholders to accept an upcoming takeover bid before its announcement. Using a novel manually collected dataset, we develop three new hypotheses and explore one existing hypothesis explain the use of ICs: (1) trade-off between speed price, (2) completion probability (3) differences in bargaining power, (4) blockholder certification...

Social commitments in time: Satisfied or compensated was the title of a presentation given at the 7th DALT workshop edition [34] in which we proposed a layered architecture for modeling and reasoning about social commitments. We gave emphasis to modularity and to the need of accommodating certain temporal aspects in order for a commitment modeling framework to be flexible enough to adapt to div...

Governmental authorities of wealthy developed nations differ in their professed commitments and activity related to the provision of the prerequisites of health through public policy action. Part 1 of this article showed how nations identified as social democratic or liberal welfare states were those where such commitments are present. Nations identified as conservative or Latin welfare states ...

Cooperative information systems (CISs) are multiagent systems geared toward heterogeneous and open information environments. Many applications|including, virtual enterprises (VEs)|require coordination of various autonomous information resources. Although preserving the autonomy of participating components is crucial, unrestrained autonomy would lead to chaos, and preclude robust behavior. A exi...

Commitments provide a flexible means for specifying the business relationships among autonomous and heterogeneous agents, and lead to a natural way of enacting such relationships. However, current formalizations of commitments incorporate conditions expressed as propositions, but disregard (1) temporal regulations and (2) an agent’s control over such regulations. Thus, they cannot handle realis...

a r t i c l e i n f o A new concept, commitments, is introduced and defined as " agreements between two or more social actors to carry out future actions " and its incorporation into, and articulation of, the actors–resources–activities model described. Commitments are distinguished from the concept of commitment as traditionally used in inter-organisational relationships. The latter is mainly ...

We define grounding in terms of shared public commitments, and link public commitments to other, private, attitudes within a decidable dynamic logic for computing implicatures and predicting an agent’s next dialogue move.