Related papers: Joint Behavior and Common Belief
The principle of minimal change in belief revision theory requires that, when accepting new information, one keeps one's belief state as close to the initial belief state as possible. This is precisely what the method known as minimal…
A standard belief on emerging collective behavior is that it emerges from simple individual rules. Most of the mathematical research on such collective behavior starts from imperative individual rules, like always go to the center. But how…
Reasoning about knowledge seems to play a fundamental role in distributed systems. Indeed, such reasoning is a central part of the informal intuitive arguments used in the design of distributed protocols. Communication in a distributed…
Providing opinions through labeling of images, tweets, etc. have drawn immense interest in crowdsourcing markets. This invokes a major challenge of aggregating multiple opinions received from different crowd workers for deriving the final…
The theory of belief functions is widely used for data from multiple sources. Different evidence combination rules have been proposed in this framework according to the properties of the sources to combine. However, most of these…
We revisit a recent puzzle about common knowledge, the ``sailboat" case (Lederman, 2018), and argue that Lewisian common knowledge allows us to reconcile the pre-theoretical intuition that certain facts are ``public" in such situations,…
Collective decision-making is a process by which a group of individuals determines a shared outcome that shapes societal dynamics; from innovation diffusion to organizational choices. A common approach to model these processes is using…
In this paper, we explore how we should aggregate the degrees of belief of of a group of agents to give a single coherent set of degrees of belief, when at least some of those agents might be probabilistically incoherent. There are a number…
Many experiments elicit subjects' prior and posterior beliefs about a random variable to assess how information affects one's own actions. However, beliefs are multi-dimensional objects, and experimenters often only elicit a single response…
Judgment aggregation problems form a class of collective decision-making problems represented in an abstract way, subsuming some well known problems such as voting. A collective decision can be reached in many ways, but a direct one-step…
Dempster/Shafer (D/S) theory has been advocated as a way of representing incompleteness of evidence in a system's knowledge base. Methods now exist for propagating beliefs through chains of inference. This paper discusses how rules with…
Most of us must have been fascinated by the eye catching displays of collectively moving animals. Schools of fish can move in a rather orderly fashion and then change direction amazingly abruptly. There are a huge number of further examples…
The combination of evidence in Dempster-Shafer theory is compared with the combination of evidence in probabilistic logic. Sufficient conditions are stated for these two methods to agree. It is then shown that these conditions are minimal…
We examine carefully the rationale underlying the approaches to belief change taken in the literature, and highlight what we view as methodological problems. We argue that to study belief change carefully, we must be quite explicit about…
To identify statistically significant conclusions, it is proposed to simultaneously test hypotheses and alternatives. It is shown that, under the condition of free combination of hypotheses and alternatives, the closure method leads to…
In the standard quantum theory, one can measure precisely only a subset of the incompatible observables. It results in lack of a formal joint probability defining objective realism even if we accept nonlocal or certain faster-than-light…
A fundamental question in causal inference is whether it is possible to reliably infer manipulation effects from observational data. There are a variety of senses of asymptotic reliability in the statistical literature, among which the most…
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…
We propose a decision-making model for joint intentionality by interpreting it as group-mindedness at the microlevel. We apply this model to give a formal justification of the first part of the Interdependence Hypothesis due to Tomasello et…
Reproducibility, the ability to recompute results, and replicability, the chances other experimenters will achieve a consistent result, are two foundational characteristics of successful scientific research. Consistent findings from…