We adopt an evolutionary approach to investigate whether and when conditional cooperation can explain the voluntary contribution phenomenon often observed in public goods experiments and in real life. Formally, conditional cooperation is captured by a regret parameter describing how much an individual regrets to contribute less than the average. We find that the evolutionary stability of condit...

We formulate a sound and complete assume-guarantee framework for reasoning compositionally about components modelled as a variant of interface automata. The specification of a component, which expresses both safety and progress properties of input and output interactions with the environment, is characterised by finite traces. The framework supports dynamic reasoning about components and specif...

The notion of ‘requirements-uncertainty’ has received a lot of attention in the Information Systems and Software Engineering literature. As the level of uncertainty of user-requirements increases, the literature advises project managers to move away from the traditional waterfall life-cycle model and towards more ‘experimental’ approaches, such as incremental-delivery and prototyping. But there...

Evolutionary theories have always been treated by legal scholars as a sort of cousin to the legal theoretical family, both in Europe and the United States. They are nice theories, they tell interesting stories, you sometimes listen to what they have to say and when among friends, you may even quote them. However, in the modern mononuclear family, when it is time to tackle important issues and r...

Blank-slate theories of human intelligence propose that reasoning is carried out by general-purpose operations applied uniformly across contents. An evolutionary approach implies a radically different model ofhuman intelligence. The task demandsofdifferent adaptive problems select for functionally specialized problem-solving strategies, unleashing massive increases in problem-solving power for ...

Our work on modeling driver behavior in a cognitive architecture has benefited greatly from two types of integration: composition of independently developed theories and models into the framework of a cognitive architecture, and generalization of common elements of theories and models into higher-level constructs within the architecture. This chapter highlights three ways in which integration b...

Many important strategic applications involve inter-corporate linkage or intra-corporate integration of information. This requires multiple databases to work together. We refer to this category of information systems as Composite Information Systems (CIS). Migrating from separate systems to a more fully integrated CIS environment is usually a difficult, expensive, and timeconsuming process both...

Evolutionary game theory is often used to analyze the evolution of moral preferences. A few studies also examine the coevolution of preferences and an institutional aspect of the decision environment. Allowing the adaptation of just one institutional aspect such as litigation or legal insurance to coevolve with morality, however, may be inadequate. If court rulings coevolve with morality the ne...

The paper deals with the cohesion part of a model of global discourse interpretation, usually known as Veins Theory (VT). By taking the notion of nuclearity (though ignoring relations), from the Rhetorical Structure Theory, VT computes strings of discourse units, called veins, from which domains of accessibility can be determined for each discourse unit. VT’s constructs best fit with an increme...

We suggest an incremental method for the co-evolution of theories of and modeling languages for business action. It consists of a cycle containing four steps: theory-based derivation of a generic modeling language, engineering of a language that is adapted to a specific modeling situation, the deployment of this language in a concrete analysis and/or design project, and the refinement of the th...