Related papers: Joint Behavior and Common Belief
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…
The principle of the common cause claims that if an improbable coincidence has occurred, there must exist a common cause. This is generally taken to mean that positive correlations between non-causally related events should disappear when…
We elucidate the dynamics of ongoing collective action among intentional agents with diverse beliefs and imperfect information. Their decisions on whether or not to contribute to the collective good depend not only on the past but also on…
Common knowledge of intentions is crucial to basic social tasks ranging from cooperative hunting to oligopoly collusion, riots, revolutions, and the evolution of social norms and human culture. Yet little is known about how common knowledge…
Human agents happen to judge that a conjunction of two terms is more probable than one of the terms, in contradiction with the rules of classical probabilities---this is the conjunction fallacy. One of the most discussed accounts of this…
We develop our interpretation of the joint belief distribution and of evidential updating that matches the following basic requirements: * there must exist an efficient method for reasoning within this framework * there must exist a clear…
The plausibility of uncommon events and miracles based on testimony of such an event has been much discussed. When analyzing the probabilities involved, it has mostly been assumed that the common events can be taken as data in the…
People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…
The theory of belief functions manages uncertainty and also proposes a set of combination rules to aggregate opinions of several sources. Some combination rules mix evidential information where sources are independent; other rules are…
When does society eventually learn the truth, or take the correct action, via observational learning? In a general model of sequential learning over social networks, we identify a simple condition for learning dubbed excludability.…
The problem of combining beliefs in the Dempster-Shafer belief theory has attracted considerable attention over the last two decades. The classical Dempster's Rule has often been criticised, and many alternative rules for belief combination…
It has been hypothesized that the evolution of modern human cognition was catalyzed by the development of jointly intentional modes of behaviour. From an early age (1-2 years), human infants outperform apes at tasks that involve…
Common knowledge/belief in rationality is the traditional standard assumption in analysing interaction among agents. This paper proposes a graph-based language for capturing significantly more complicated structures of higher-order beliefs…
Collective motion is ubiquitous in nature; groups of animals, such as fish, birds, and ungulates appear to move as a whole, exhibiting a rich behavioral repertoire that ranges from directed movement to milling to disordered swarming.…
Cooperation in human society is sustained by reputation. In general, the reputation of an individual is determined by others who observe his behavior, but this rarely happens in private situations. This may cause people to behave…
If you search for 'collective behaviour' with your web browser most of the texts popping up will be about group activities of humans, including riots, fashion and mass panic. Nevertheless, collective behaviour is also considered to be an…
Motivated by the search for forms of distributed belief that do not collapse in the face of conflicting information, this paper introduces the notions of cautious and bold distributed belief. Both notions rely on maximally consistent…
A primary motivation for reasoning under uncertainty is to derive decisions in the face of inconclusive evidence. However, Shafer's theory of belief functions, which explicitly represents the underconstrained nature of many reasoning…
This paper examines the concept of a combination rule for belief functions. It is shown that two fairly simple and apparently reasonable assumptions determine Dempster's rule, giving a new justification for it.
Agents receive private signals about an unknown state. The resulting joint belief distributions are complex and lack a simple characterization. Our key insight is that, when conditioned on the state, the structure of belief distributions…