Abstract A growing number of companies have announced zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) to eliminate commodities produced at the expense forests from their supply chains. Translating these aspirational goals into forest conservation requires mapping and monitoring (M&M) systems that are technically adequate therefore credible, salient so they address needs decision makers, legitimate in...

Multiagent systems can use commitments as the core of a general coordination infrastructure, supporting both cooperative and non-cooperative interactions. Agents whose objectives are aligned, where one agent help another achieve greater reward by sacrificing some its own reward, should choose commitment to maximize their joint reward. We present solution problem how agents efficiently find an (...

This paper studies the optimal combination of debt and dividend commitments in an agency model of the firm. Financial policy is relevant because ex-post information asymmetry requires managerial rewards to depend on the ability to meet financial commitments. If perquisite or inside information problems exist in isolation, debt-based incentives as assumed in previous studies result endogenously....

We consider the problem of relating an agent’s internal state (its beliefs and goals) and its social state (its commitments to and from other agents) as a way to develop a comprehensive account of decision making by agents in a multiagent system. We model this problem in terms of hierarchical task networks (HTNs) and show how HTN planning provides a natural representation and reasoning framewor...

Distributed Artificial Intelligence systems, in which multiple agents interact to improve their individual performance and to enhance the system’s overall utility, are becoming an increasingly pervasive means of conceptualising a diverse range of applications. As the discipline matures, researchers are beginning to strive for the underlying theories and principles which guide the central proces...

We propose a theory of communicative interactions based on the idea that it is constitutive of interpersonal communication to create and manage a fragment of social reality. We define such a fragment in terms of joint commitments of the interactants, and analyze how these commitments are made in a conversation. We distinguish between three layers of joint commitments: those that regulate the em...