Social Rationalizability with Mediation

Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 2006

Collective action is interpreted as a matter of people doing something together, and it is assumed that this involves their having a collective intention to do that thing together. The account of collective intention for which the author has argued elsewhere is presented. In terms that are explained, the parties are jointly committed to intend as a body that such-and-such. Collective action problems in the sense of rational choice theory-problems such as the various forms of coordination problem and the prisoner's dilemma-are then considered. An explanation is given of how, when such a problem is interpreted in terms of the parties' inclinations, a suitable collective intention resolves the problem for agents who are rational in a broad sense other than the technical sense of game theory.

Journal of Logic and Computation, 1999

Although mediation between disputing states seems to have become a prevalent method of conflict resolution, especially in the post-Cold War era, the fact remains that in only 35% of all militarized disputes since World War II did some form of third-party mediation take place. This suggests that some conflict situations are more open to mediation than others. This study develops and tests a rational model of the conditions under which mediation will occur in international conflicts. The model explores the mediator's intervention dilemma in terms of her perceived ability to transform the game that characterizes the present conflict into a game of (partial or complete) cooperation. The measure of conflict versatility is offered to denote the likelihood of, and difficulty involved in, such transformation. It is argued that the greater the versatility of the conflict, (1) the more likely are disputants to seek mediation, (2) the more likely are outside parties to mediate, and (3) the more intrusive the mediation strategies employed. Examining data on Militarized Interstate Disputes (MIDs) since World War II, the authors find substantive support for these hypotheses. The article concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and empirical implications of these findings. * We thank Steven Brams, Lawrence Susskind, Han Dorussen, and the reviewers for their comments on earlier versions. We also thank Eliyahu Greitzer for programming the computer simulation.

Acta Psychologica, 2008

In this commentary, I argue that there is indeed considerable evidence in support of the notion that people tend to reason from a collective (or team) perspective by asking themselves questions such as ''What do we want, and what should I do help achieve it?" . Collective rationality in interactive decisions: Evidence for team reasoning. Acta Psychologica]. As such, in my view, team reasoning -and thinking, feeling, and acting in terms of collective rationality -is consistent with a social utility model (or transformational model) which considers the weights that people attach not only to outcomes for self, but also to outcomes for other, and to equality in outcomes . The pursuit of joint outcomes and equality in outcomes: An integrative model of social value orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77,[337][338][339][340][341][342][343][344][345][346][347][348][349]. This commentary provides an illustration demonstrating that the integrative model is well-suited to account for the findings observed by .

2008

We propose an extension of Coalitional ATL (a logic for reasoning about coalitions and their formation process, see [10]) by goals. This goal framework allows for a finer grained modeling of coalitions: Coalitional frameworks, based on Dungs's abstract argumentation framework, are used to point out conflicts between agents, and goals refer to agents' subjective incentives to join (or not to join) coalitions. We focus on two different aspects for cooperation allowing a more practical modeling of systems.

KES-AMSTA, 2013, 2013

This paper is to introduce the new concept of coalition Nash equilibrium of a strategic game, and to show that a communication among the players in a coalition leads to the equilibrium through messages. A coalition Nash equilibrium for a strategic game consists of (1) a subset S of players,(2) independent mixed strategies for each member of S,(3) the conjecture of the actions for the other players not in S with the condition that each member of S maximises his/her expected payoff according to the product of all mixed strategies for S and the other players’ conjecture. However, this paper stands on the Bayesian point of view as follows: The players start with the same prior distribution on a state-space. In addition they have private information which is given by a partition of the state space. Each player in a coalition S predicts the other players’ actions as the posterior of the others’ actions given his/her information. He/she communicates privately their beliefs about the other players’ actions through messages among all members in S according to the communication network in S, which message is information about his/her individual conjecture about the others’ actions. The recipients update their belief by the messages. Precisely, at every stage each player communicates privately not only his/her belief about the others’ actions but also his/her rationality as messages according to a protocol and then the recipient updates their private information and revises her/his prediction. In this circumstance, we show that the conjectures of the players in a coalition S regarding the future beliefs converge in the long run communication, which lead to a coalition

Journal of Applied Non-classical Logics, 2012

In Multi Agent Systems it is often the case that individual preferences are not compatible and coalitions compete to achieve a given result. The paper presents a language to talk about the conflict between coalitional choices and it expresses deontic notions to evaluate them. We will be specifically concerned with cases where the collective perspective is at odds with the individual perspective.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2000

There is a growing belief that the agents' cognitive structures play a central role on the enhancement of predicative capacities of decision-making strategies. This paper analyses and simulates the construction of cognitive social structures in the process of decision making with multiple actors. In this process it is argued that the agent's rational choices may be assessed by its motivations, according to different patterns of social interactions. We first construct an abstract model of social dependence between agents, and define a set of social structures that are easily identifiable according to potential interactions. We then carry out a set of experiments at micro-social levels of analysis, where the agents' cognitive structures are explicitly represented. These experiments indicate that different social dependence structures imply distinct structural patterns of negotiation proposals, which appear to have diverse patterns of complexity in the search space. It is subsequently shown that this observation emerges as an issue of ambiguity in the regulation of different decision-making criteria, relative to motivation-oriented and utility-oriented choices. In the scope of this ambiguity, we finally make some conjectures relative to further analytical and empirical analysis around the relation between patterns of complexity of social structures and decision-making. coalition. He is dependent on agent Tp for two needed actions -Lisbon/Macau and Macau/HongK -and on agent Au for needed action HongK/Sydney. The information that agent Af captures from the proposal network is related to the goals, plans and actions that he can offer to his possible partners. For each needed action and possible partner in the engaged plan we may find information concerning the highest dep-sit (d-sit), the dependence strength on the object agent (d-strength), and the cost ascribed by the possible partner to the needed action (d-a-cost).

Humans are intuitively cooperative1. Humans are also capable of deliberation, which includes social comparison2, self-reflection3, and mental simulation of the future4. Does deliberation undermine or sustain cooperation? Whereas some studies suggest that deliberation is positively associated with cooperation5, other work indicates that deliberation (vis-à-vis intuition) impairs cooperation in social dilemmas6,7. Do some aspects of reasoning qualify the effects of deliberation – that is whether deliberation sustains cooperation or impairs it? Here we propose that wise reasoning8–10 – i.e., taking a bigger picture perspective on the situation, including sensitivity to temporal and social interdependence between events – helps to integrate self-protective and cooperative goals, thereby sustaining cooperation when deliberating. Study 1 demonstrated that individual differences in wise reasoning about personal conflicts moderated the impact of naturalistic and experimentally manipulated deliberation time on cooperation. Studies 2-3 manipulated an observer perspective, the key aspect of wise reasoning, which eliminated the negative effect of deliberation time on cooperation. Under these circumstances, participants reported being guided by interdependent goals when making their decisions; thus in these conditions, deliberation sustained cooperation. Combining scholarship on wisdom and behavioral economics, the present insights qualify the relationship between deliberation and prosociality, and highlight conditions under which wisdom promotes prosociality.

Acta Psychologica, 2008

The experiments reported in our target article provide strong evidence of collective utility maximization, and the findings suggest that team reasoning should now be included among the social value orientations used in cognitive and social psychology. Evidential decision theory offers a possible alternative explanation for our results but fails to predict intuitively compelling strategy choices in simple games with asymmetric team-reasoning outcomes. Although many of our experimental participants evidently used team reasoning, some appear to have ignored the other players' expected strategy choices and used lowerlevel, nonstrategic forms of reasoning. Standard payoff transformations cannot explain the experimental findings, nor team reasoning in general, without an unrealistic assumption that players invariably reason nonstrategically.