Moral requirements apply to rational agents as such. But it is a conceptual truth that if agents are morally required to act in a certain way then we expect them to act in that way. Being rational, as such, must therefore suffice to ground our expectation that rational agents will do what they are morally required to do. But how could this be so? It could only be so if we think of the moral req...

Statistical decision theory axiomatically assumes that the relative desirability of different options that humans perceive is well described by assigning them optionspecific scalar utility functions. However, this assumption is refuted by observed human behavior, including studies wherein preferences have been shown to change systematically simply through variation in the set of choice options ...

A model of endogenous investment booms and busts with rational agents is presented where outside investors are uncertain about both industry (aggregate) and firm-specific capital productivity, and insiders manipulate information through strategic productivity disclosures. For intermediate and high levels of agency conflict, there are aggregate investment distortions along the equilibrium path, ...

Although explanation is widely regarded as an important concept in the study of rational inquiry, it remains largely unexplored outside the philosophy of science. This, I believe, is not due to oversight as much as to institutional resistance. In analytic philosophy it is basic that epistemic rationality is a function of justification and that justification is a function of argument. Explanatio...

Recent research has shown that virtual agent able to express empathic emotions enhances human-machine interaction. In this paper, we present the capabilities that virtual agent should have to be empathic toward a user. Moreover, we propose a computational representation of emotions which may be experienced by a user during a human-machine dialog. This semantically grounded formal representation...

Recent years have seen an increasing interest of multiagent system research in employing the theory of argumentation for the development of communication protocols. While significant progress has been made in formalising argument-based communication, (possibly adaptive) agent-level argumentation strategies as a practical integration of rational agent reasoning and inter-agent dialogue have rece...

Stuart Russell [14] describes rational agents as " those that do the right thing ". The problem of designing a rational agent then becomes the problem of figuring out what the right thing is. There are two approaches to the latter problem, depending upon the kind of agent we want to build. On the one hand, anthropomorphic agents are those that can help human beings rather directly in their inte...

Contrary to my critics, voter irrationality does not imply that economists cannot mitigate political failure. With rational voters, reform-minded economists have few viable tactics; with irrational voters reformers have more options. Rational voters can be swayed only by facts and logic; irrational voters could respond to better rhetoric. Rational voters strategically punish those who ignore th...

The doctrine that Christ is really present in the Eucharist appears to entail that Christ’s body is not only multiply located but present in different ways at different locations. Moreover, the doctrine poses an even more difficult metaquestion: what makes a theological explanation of the Eucharist a ‘real presence’ account? Aquinas’s defence of transubstantiation, perhaps the paradigmatic acco...