A rational agent (artificial or otherwise) residing in a complex changing environment must gather information perceptually, update that information as the world changes, and combine that information with causal information to reason about the changing world. Using the system of defeasible reasoning that is incorporated into the OSCAR architecture for rational agents (Pollock 1995 and 1995a), a ...

We consider a pricing game in which two competing sellers offer two similar products on a social network among agents (communities). Each agent chooses, in an iterative manner, between the two products depending on what his neighbours do. This introduces two separate games; one between the agents and one between the two sellers. We show that the first game is a full potential game and provide a...

In the classic herding model, agents receive private signals about an underlying binary state of nature, and act sequentially to choose one of two possible actions, after observing the actions of their predecessors. We investigate what types of behaviors lead to asymptotic learning, where agents will eventually converge to the right action in probability. It is known that for rational agents an...

In this paper, we propose a new approach to deal with beliefs by supposing that a rational agent has a degree of trustiness for each information it disposes of. We propose (i) a new framework for dealing with imprecise beliefs and desires; (ii) two algorithms for updating the mental state of an agent in this new setting; (iii) three ways for comparing the resulting fuzzy set of desires and (iv)...

A general assumption for incentive mechanisms is that all agents are rational and seek to maximize their utility. When some agents are irrational and launch various attacks, these mechanisms may fail to work. To address the issue of evaluating the robustness of incentive mechanisms, we propose a robustness metric in this paper. It is inspired by the studies of the evolutionary game theory and d...

My point is that if we are intelligibly to attribute attitudes and beliefs, or usefully to describe motions as behaviour, then we are committed to finding, in the pattern of behaviour, belief, and desire, a large degree of rationality and consistency ... .The limit thus placed on the social sciences is set not by nature, but by us when we decide to view men as rational agents with goals and pur...

This article examines prospects for theories and methods of preferences, both in the specific sense of the preferences of the ideal rational agents considered in economics and decision theory and in the broader interplay between reasoning and rationality considered in philosophy, psychology, and artificial intelligence. Modern applications seek to employ preferences as means for specifying, des...

Escalation of commitment to a failing course of action has been studied in the IT literature, where IT managers are shown to continue committing resources to bad project instead of terminating them. We make a case that escalation of commitment can be considered as the problem of not exercising an option to abandon a project at the correct (optimal) time. The value of a real option is time sensi...

Computational experiments are reported involving the concept of foreknowledge, an agent’s direct, unmediated and accurate, but possibly incomplete, awareness of its future including states and events involving the agent itself. Foreknowledge is used here as a conceptual tool with which to explore certain issues around time and rationality. We first explain how foreknowledge in this sense may be...

This ‘Russian Cards’ problem originated at the Moscow Math Olympiad 2000. An analysis in dynamic epistemic logic and various solutions are presented in [vD03]. But there remained some open questions related to the dynamics. In this contribution we answer one of those questions. They are not trivial, because the interpretation of an announcement that is made towards a solution of the problem, al...