The canonical principal-agent problem involves a risk-neutral principal who must use incentives to motivate a risk-averse agent to take a costly, unobservable action that improves the principal’s payoff. The standard solution requires an inefficient shifting of risk to the agent. This paper summarizes some experimental research that throws doubt on the validity of this conclusion. Experimental ...

Interactive drama has been discussed for a number of years as a new AI-based interactive experience (Laurel 1986, Bates 1992). While there has been substantial technical progress in building believable agents (Bates, Loyall and Reilly 1992, Blumberg 1996, Hayes-Roth, van Gent and Huber 1996), and some technical progress in interactive plot (Weyhrauch 1997), no work has yet been completed which ...

The development of autonomous software agents requires consideration of a number of elements. One interesting aspect of the study of software agency is to enable effective inductive reasoning, amongst agents, using accumulated experience of an agent. However, this experience may vary from agent to another, and only by exploiting these differences, in the right way, can the agents come to an agr...

Evaluating the investment that healthcare organisations make in quality improvement requires knowledge of impact at multiple levels, including patient care, workforce and other organisational resources. The degree to which these resources help organisations to survive and thrive in the challenging contexts in which healthcare is designed and delivered is unknown. Investigating this question fro...

Theories of collective intentionality and theories relational autonomy share a common interest in analyzing the social dynamics agency. However, whereas conceive groups primarily as intentional voluntarily willed, claim that autonomous agency is both scaffolded constrained by forces structures, including constraints imposed nonvoluntary group membership. The question raised this difference view...

Since the beginning of the XXI century, marketing theory has moved through a series of epistemological shifts from modern positivism to postmodern constructivism. This has resulted in a series of changes to the main concepts of “traditional” marketing such as: market, product, customer, and value. These shifts can be better viewed under a social cybernetics approach such as agency theory. This ...