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...

This paper provides a logically precise analysis of grounding and disputes in dialogue. The semantics distinguishes among the public commitments of each dialogue participant, including commitments to relational speech acts or rhetorical relations (e.g., Narration, Explanation, Acknowledgement). Thus commitments to the illocutionary contribution of an utterance as well as to its compositional se...

We describe a variation of the Prêt-à-Voter voting protocol that keeps the same ballot layout but borrows and slightly modifies the underlying cryptographic primitives from Punchscan, which is based on bit commitments. By using unconditionally hiding bit commitments, our protocol obtains unconditional privacy. We suggest a way to make cheating on the computational binding bit commitments imposs...

In the interaction between agents we can have an explicative discourse, when communicating preferences or intentions, and a normative discourse, when considering normative knowledge. For justifying their actions our agents are endowed with a Justification and Explanation Logic (JEL), capable to cover both the justification for their commitments and explanations why they had to act in that way, ...

Since the introduction of a commitments procedure in EU antitrust policy (Article 9 of Council Regulation 1/2003), the European Commission has extensively settled cases of alleged anticompetitive practices. In this paper, we use a formal model of law enforcement (Bebchuk, 1984; Shavell, 1988) to identify the optimal procedure to resolve cases in a context of uncertainty related to the law (L-un...

SUMMARY Increasingly, food companies play an important role in stemming the rising burden of nutrition-related chronic diseases. Concrete actions taken by these companies include global public commitments to address food reformulation, consumer information, responsible marketing, promotion of healthy lifestyles, and public-private partnerships. These actions are reviewed together with eleven sp...