Related papers: Can Society Function Without Ethical Agents? An In…

Agents, some with a bias, decide between undertaking a risky project and a safe alternative based on information about the project's efficiency. Only a part of that information is verifiable. Unbiased agents want to undertake only efficient…

The issue of how to make embodied agents explainable has experienced a surge of interest over the last three years, and, there are many terms that refer to this concept, e.g., transparency or legibility. One reason for this high variance in…

Traditional statistical theory assumes that the analysis to be performed on a given data set is selected independently of the data themselves. This assumption breaks downs when data are re-used across analyses and the analysis to be…

How do humans respond to indirect social influence when making decisions? We analysed an experiment where subjects had to repeatedly guess the correct answer to factual questions, while having only aggregated information about the answers…

Artificially intelligent systems, given a set of non-trivial ethical rules to follow, will inevitably be faced with scenarios which call into question the scope of those rules. In such cases, human reasoners typically will engage in…

A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…

Influencing (and being influenced by) others through social networks is fundamental to all human societies. Whether this happens through the diffusion of rumors, opinions, or viruses, identifying the diffusion source (i.e., the person that…

Individuals in groups must often choose between acting selfishly and cooperating for the common good. The choices they make are based on their beliefs on how they expect their actions to affect others. We show that for a broad set of…

Norms help regulate a society. Norms may be explicit (represented in structured form) or implicit. We address the emergence of explicit norms by developing agents who provide and reason about explanations for norm violations in deciding…

Indirect reciprocity is a mechanism by which individuals cooperate with those who have cooperated with others. This creates a regime in which repeated interactions are not necessary to incent cooperation (as would be required for direct…

Law enforcement acquires costly evidence with the aim of securing the conviction of a defendant, who is convicted if a decision-maker's belief exceeds a certain threshold. Either law enforcement or the decision-maker is biased and is…

Artificial agents have been shown to learn to communicate when needed to complete a cooperative task. Some level of language structure (e.g., compositionality) has been found in the learned communication protocols. This observed structure…

We study a simple model of an asset market with informed and non-informed agents. In the absence of non-informed agents, the market becomes information efficient when the number of traders with different private information is large enough.…

A universal feature of human societies is the adoption of systems of rules and norms in the service of cooperative ends. How can we build learning agents that do the same, so that they may flexibly cooperate with the human institutions they…

Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…

We focus on how individual behavior that complies with social norms interferes with performance-based incentive mechanisms in organizations with multiple distributed decision-making agents. We model social norms to emerge from interactions…

Our approach is basically a coherence approach, but we avoid the well-known pitfalls of coherence theories of truth. Consistency is replaced by reliability, which expresses support and attack, and, in principle, every theory (or agent,…

Imitation learning enables autonomous agents to learn from human examples, without the need for a reward signal. Still, if the provided dataset does not encapsulate the task correctly, or when the task is too complex to be modeled, such…

Economies and societal structures in general are complex stochastic systems which may not lend themselves well to algebraic analysis. An addition of subjective value criteria to the mechanics of interacting agents will further complicate…

Culture involves the origination and transmission of ideas, but the conditions in which culture can emerge and evolve are unclear. We constructed and studied a highly simplified neural-network model of these processes. In this model ideas…