Related papers: Variations on distributed belief

We study notions of (virtual) group knowledge and group belief within multi-agent evidence models, obtained by extending the topological semantics of evidence-based belief and fallible knowledge from individuals to groups. We completely…

We introduce a new logic of graded distributed belief that allows us to express the fact that a group of agents distributively believe that a certain fact holds with at least strength k. We interpret our logic by means of computationally…

We study distributed knowledge, which is what privately informed agents come to know by communicating freely with one another and sharing everything they know. Knowledge is not necessarily partitional: agents may be boundedly rational and…

This paper is aimed at providing a uniform framework for reasoning about beliefs of multiple agents and their fusion. In the first part of the paper, we develop logics for reasoning about cautiously merged beliefs of agents with different…

Over time, there have hen refinements in the way that probability distributions are used for representing beliefs. Models which rely on single probability distributions depict a complete ordering among the propositions of interest, yet…

We study the problem of distributed cooperative learning, where a group of agents seeks to agree on a set of hypotheses that best describes a sequence of private observations. In the scenario where the set of hypotheses is large, we propose…

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…

This paper studies a novel stochastic compartmental model that describes the dynamics of trust in society. The population is split into three compartments representing levels of trust in society: trusters, skeptics and doubters. The focus…

Belief systems are often treated as globally consistent sets of propositions or as scalar-valued probability distributions. Such representations tend to obscure the internal structure of belief, conflate external credibility with internal…

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…

The problem of belief tracking in the presence of stochastic actions and observations is pervasive and yet computationally intractable. In this work we show however that probabilistic beliefs can be maintained in factored form exactly and…

Human history has been marked by social instability and conflict, often driven by the irreconcilability of opposing sets of beliefs, ideologies, and religious dogmas. The dynamics of belief systems has been studied mainly from two distinct…

Collective intelligence is believed to underly the remarkable success of human society. The formation of accurate shared beliefs is one of the key components of human collective intelligence. How are accurate shared beliefs formed in groups…

This paper provides a behavioral analysis of conservatism in beliefs. I introduce a new axiom, Dynamic Conservatism, that relaxes Dynamic Consistency when information and prior beliefs "conflict." When the agent is a subjective expected…

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…

How can we draw trustworthy scientific conclusions? One criterion is that a study can be replicated by independent teams. While replication is critically important, it is arguably insufficient. If a study is biased for some reason and other…

In many real-world situations, there is often not enough information to know that a certain strategy will succeed in achieving the goal, but there is a good reason to believe that it will. The paper introduces the term ``doxastic'' for such…

We propose a belief-formation model where agents attempt to discriminate between two theories, and where the asymmetry in strength between confirming and disconfirming evidence tilts beliefs in favor of theories that generate strong (and…

We define notions of cautiousness and cautious belief to provide epistemic conditions for iterated admissibility in finite games. We show that iterated admissibility characterizes the behavioral implications of "cautious rationality and…

Interest in how democracies form consensus has increased recently, with statistical physics and economics approaches both suggesting that there is convergence to a fixed point in belief networks, but with fluctuations in opinions when there…