Related papers: A static theory of promises

In cooperative human decision-making, agreements are often not total; a partial degree of agreement is sufficient to commit to a decision and move on, as long as one is somewhat confident that the involved parties are likely to stand by…

The advent of increasingly powerful language models has raised expectations for language-based interactions. However, controlling these models is a challenge, emphasizing the need to be able to investigate the feasibility and value of their…

Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…

Effective software safety standards will contribute to confidence, or assurance, in the safety of the systems in which the software is used. It is infeasible to demonstrate a correlation between standards and accidents, but there is an…

Patterns embody repeating phenomena, and, as such, they are partly but not fully detachable from their context. 'Design patterns' and 'pattern languages' are established methods for working with patterns. They have been applied in…

Smart cities are being planned for several advanced applications and services for the inhabitants. Smart cities initiative promise many new services which are not possible in the traditional city frameworks. In the smart city framework, the…

A general theory of innovation and progress in human society is outlined, based on the combat between two opposite forces (conservatism/inertia and speculative herding "bubble" behavior). We contend that human affairs are characterized by…

Models necessarily capture only parts of a reality. Prediction models aim at capturing a future reality. In this paper we address the question of how the future is constructed (or: imagined) in an investment context where market…

We introduce the notion of fault tolerant mechanism design, which extends the standard game theoretic framework of mechanism design to allow for uncertainty about execution. Specifically, we define the problem of task allocation in which…

We analyze a number of properties obligations have or should have.

Networking is undergoing a transformation throughout our industry. The need for scalable network control and automation shifts the focus from hardware driven products with ad hoc control to Software Defined Networks. This process is now…

Traditionally, an agent's beliefs would come from what the agent can see, hear, or sense. In the modern world, beliefs are often based on the data available to the agents. In this work, we investigate a dynamic logic of such beliefs that…

A model is developed to study the effectiveness of innovation and its impact on structure creation and structure change on agent-based societies. The abstract model that is developed is easily adapted to any particular field. In any…

We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model, in which actions require different amounts of effort, and the agent privately knows his ability that determines his cost of effort. We show that linear contracts admit approximation…

We describe the fundamental difference between the nature of problems in traditional physics and that of many problems arising today in systems biology and other complex settings. The difference hinges on the much larger number of a priori…

Pursuing a scientific idea is often justified by the promise associated with it. Philosophers of science have proposed a variety of approaches to such promise, including more specific indicators. Economic models in particular emphasise the…

We present a general logical framework for reasoning about agents' cognitive attitudes of both epistemic type and motivational type. We show that it allows us to express a variety of relevant concepts for qualitative decision theory…

We introduce the class of pay or play games, which captures scenarios in which each decision maker is faced with a choice between two actions: one with a fixed payoff and an- other with a payoff dependent on others' selected actions. This…

We consider a large class of social learning models in which a group of agents face uncertainty regarding a state of the world, share the same utility function, observe private signals, and interact in a general dynamic setting. We…

The study of spacetime, and its role in understanding functional systems has received little attention in information science. Recent work, on the origin of universal scaling in cities and biological systems, provides an intriguing insight…