Collective Decision Making

In this paper, we take up and advance the project of rethinking “scientific literacy” by Eisenhart, Finkel, and Marion (American Educational Research Journal, 1996, 33, 261–295). As part of a project of rethinking science education, we advance three propositions. First, because society is built on division of labor, not everybody needs to know the same basic sets of concepts; it is more important to allow the emergence of scientific literacy as a collective property. Second, scientific knowledge ought not to be privileged in democratic collective decision making but ought to be one of many resources. Third, rethinking science education as and for participation in community life sets up the potential for lifelong participation in and learning of science‐related issues. To show the viability of these propositions, we provide a case study based on a 3‐year, multisite ethnographic research project as part of which we investigated science in the community. Framing our work in terms of ac...

qui les exhortait à améliorer la parité dans leurs propositions de promotion au sein du corps des directeurs de recherche (DR), voir prologue ci-dessous. Plusieurs éléments de ce parcours sur trois ans sont inclus ici. Ils comprennent notamment :  les réflexions impulsées par l'atelier de travail du CoNRS «Critères équitables d'évaluation du comité national » qui s'est tenu le 3 juillet 2019 dans les salles du Comité National au siège du CNRS et qui a impliqué une trentaine de personnes,  le webinaire intitulé : « Parité et évaluation non-discriminatoire au CNRS : pertinence et conformité juridique d'éléments de contexte personnels dans les dossiers de carrière et de recrutement » qui s'est tenu le 12 mars 2021 avec une centaine de participantes et participants,  les échanges avec plusieurs sections, instances de coordination et le secrétariat général du CoNRS, avec des instances du CNRS (dont la mission pour la place des femmes au CNRS (MPDF) et le comité parité-égalité) et externes (dont l'Association Femmes & Sciences en général et Claudine Hermann en particulier) actives sur le sujet,  les nombreuses discussions en réunion plénière de la section 14 ayant abouti à la mise à jour des critères d'évaluation de la section 14 officiellement adoptés en décembre 2020 (voir annexe 2). Les membres du comité parité de la section 14 tiennent à remercier toutes celles et tous ceux qui ont contribué à ce parcours, en particulier leurs collègues de la section 14, présents et passés, dont Jean-Cyrille Hierso qui a fait partie du comité parité pendant son mandat au Comité National. Les propos et recommandations de ce document n'engagent cependant que les signataires ci-dessous.

Nash’s agencies method for coalition formation suffers from a critical computational flaw: negative
acceptance probabilities when coalition values are large relative to the rationality parameter. This
breakdown has prevented practical implementation for over fifteen years. We resolve this instability by replacing linear utility calculations with squared payoffs, ensuring mathematical positivity
while preserving the method’s core game-theoretic properties.

Our approach guarantees 0 < ai j < 1 for all parameter values, enables convergent iterative dynamics, and maintains computational complexity of O(n^3) per iteration. Empirical validation across multiple scenarios, player numbers, and coalition structures confirms stability where the original method fails in 23% of realistic parameter combinations. The squared transformation incurs modest welfare costs (0.6–3.2%) but provides complete algorithmic reliability. This represents a practical solution that completes Nash’s unfinished algorithmic framework for coalition formation.

La procédure Wo-Smith propose une nouvelle façon de traiter les élections de type Condorcet : au lieu d’explorer tous les chemins du graphe des duels (coût ≈ m³), l’algorithme balaie une seule fois le score positionnel des candidats. De cette façon, il parvient en une seule passe à extraire le noyau du groupe de Smith et désigner les vainqueurs de Condorcet et de Schulze. Ce tour de force réduit la complexité des opérations ; un tri des marges (O(m² log m)) suivi d’une poignée de tests SCC (O(m²)) suffisent, rendant la procédure scalable pour des scrutins à grande échelle. Deux modes sont proposés : (i) « noyau », qui s’arrête à l’identification de l’ensemble de Smith, du vainqueur de Condorcet ou de Schulze, et garantit l’IIA globale, la clone-proofness et une auditabilité complète ; (ii) « classement complet », qui fournit un ordre exhaustif de tous les candidats tout en conservant l’IIA locale. La procédure Wo-Smith allie ainsi élégance, rapidité, déterminisme et solides garanties axiomatiques.

The study of collective decision-making spans various fields such as brain and behavioural sciences, economics, management sciences, and artificial intelligence. Despite these interdisciplinary applications, little is known regarding how a group of simple &#39;yes/no&#39; units, such as neurons in the brain, can select the best option among multiple options. One prerequisite for achieving such correct choices by the brain is correct evaluation of relative option quality, which enables a collective decision maker to efficiently choose the best option. Here, we applied a sensory discrimination mechanism using yes/no units with differential thresholds to a model for making a collective choice among multiple options. The performance corresponding to the correct choice was shown to be affected by various parameters. High performance can be achieved by tuning the threshold distribution with the options&#39; quality distribution. The number of yes/no units allocated to each option and its ...

FSI Insights are written by members of the Financial Stability Institute (FSI) of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), often in collaboration with staff from supervisory agencies and central banks. The papers aim to contribute to international discussions on a range of contemporary regulatory and supervisory policy issues and implementation challenges faced by financial sector authorities. The views expressed in them are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the BIS or the Basel-based committees. Authorised by the Chairman of the FSI, Fernando Restoy.

The voting system we propose gives each member state a voting weight proportional to the square root of its population and fixes the quota – the threshold for approving a proposed act – at 62% of the total votes. One might add the requirement, that a majority of the states support the decision. Such an additional voting criterion would give more power to the smaller states (“One state, one vote”), but would cause only a moderate deviation from the principle of equal power of all citizens. It is a political issue whether or not one wants to do so.

In this article, we present a collective decision-making framework inspired by biological swarms and capable of supporting the emergence of a consensus within a population of agents in the absence of environment-mediated communication (stigmergy). Instead, amplification is the result of the variation of a confidence index, stored in individual memory and providing each agent with a statistical estimate of the current popularity of its preferred choice within the whole population. We explore the fundamental properties of our framework using a combination of analytical and numerical methods. We then use Monte Carlo simulation to investigate its applicability to host selection in the presence of multiple alternatives, a problem found in application migration scenarios. The advantages of self-organization and the use of statistically predictive methods in this context are also discussed.

Collective behavior based on self-organization has been shown in group-living animals from insects to vertebrates. These findings have stimulated engineers to investigate approaches for the coordination of autonomous multirobot systems based on self-organization. In this experimental study, we show collective decision-making by mixed groups of cockroaches and socially integrated autonomous robots, leading to shared shelter selection. Individuals, natural or artificial, are perceived as equivalent, and the collective decision emerges from nonlinear feedbacks based on local interactions. Even when in the minority, robots can modulate the collective decision-making process and produce a global pattern not observed in their absence. These results demonstrate the possibility of using intelligent autonomous devices to study and control self-organized behavioral patterns in group-living animals.

Dans son rapport rédigé en 2014, le Conseil Supérieur de la Recherche et de la Technologie (France) ouvrait une interrogation d’enjeu majeur : alors même que les connaissances ne cessent de progresser nous sommes de plus en plus confrontés à des crises et des retours de réalité. La diversité et la persistance de leurs manifestations interrogent le monde de la recherche et la société dans son ensemble. Ce questionnement, partagé avec le partenaire industriel avec lequel nous avons engagé cette recherche, nous a conduits à retenir que l’Entreprise était un lieu particulièrement fécond pour aborder cette problématique. Dans ce cadre de recherche partenarial, nous avons retenu d’y contribuer en investiguant la tension entre les espaces saturés de réponses (exigence apocritique) dans lesquels nous opérons, et les retours de réalité auxquels le monde que nous constituons se cogne (exigence problématologique).Notre thèse vise à rendre compte de l’exploration d’un geste critique et réflexif...

Group-living animals are often faced with choosing between one or more alternative resource sites. A central question in such collective decision making includes determining which individuals induce the decision and when. This experimental and theoretical study of shelter selection by cockroach groups demonstrates that choices can emerge through nonlinear interaction dynamics between equal individuals without perfect knowledge or leadership. We identify a simple mechanism whereby a decision is taken on the move with limited information and signaling and without comparison of available opportunities. This mechanism leads to optimal mean benefit for group individuals. Our model points to a generic self-organized collective decision-making process independent of animal species.

In mixed societies of robots and cockroaches, several insect-likerobot (Insbot) and animals interact in order to perform collective decisionmaking. Many gregarious species are able to collectively select a resting site without any leadership. The key process is based on the modulation of the probability of leaving the shelter according to the total population under this shelter and its light intensity. It is important that cockroaches perceive the robot as a "congener". This recognition is mainly based on a chemical blend. The aim of this study is to validate experimentally (1) the behavioral patterns expressed by the cockroaches in presence of shelters and of an Insbot, and (2) the important role played by the chemical blend on collective decisionmakings.

Collective behavior based on self-organization has been shown in group-living animals from insects to vertebrates. These findings have stimulated engineers to investigate approaches for the coordination of autonomous multirobot systems based on self-organization. In this experimental study, we show collective decision-making by mixed groups of cockroaches and socially integrated autonomous robots, leading to shared shelter selection. Individuals, natural or artificial, are perceived as equivalent, and the collective decision emerges from nonlinear feedbacks based on local interactions. Even when in the minority, robots can modulate the collective decision-making process and produce a global pattern not observed in their absence. These results demonstrate the possibility of using intelligent autonomous devices to study and control self-organized behavioral patterns in group-living animals.

Amplification is the main component of many collective phenomena in social and gregarious insects. In a society, individuals face a mixed palette of odours coming from different groups (lines, strains) and individuals present discrimination capabilities. However, often at the collective level, different groups may cooperate and act together. To understand this apparent contradiction, we use a model of food recruitment where each group of foragers have its own blend of pheromone trail that is partly recognized by the others groups. The model shows that a low level of recognition between signals is sufficient to produce a collaborative pattern between groups and that beyond a critical value of recognition, only the aggregation of all the groups around the same food source is observed. The comparison between this model and one describing the site selection by gregarious insects (e.g. cockroach) suggests that such collective response is a generic property of social phenomena governed by amplification processes.

In economics prominence has been given to a peculiar reductionist view according to which ‘collective thinking’ is the straightforward result of the work of a specific algorithm - the social welfare function - by means of which any set of potential collective decisions may be ranked. The mental process is seen as the product of the work of a software.

This research project sought to address the way in which road safety is perceived by the wider community and policymakers, and how it can be reframed using a holistic approach. Given the almost universally acknowledged importance of speed as a major contributing factor in the number and severity of traffic crashes a sub-theme is raised by the question: How can a holistic approach be applied in a way that reconnects road safety to communities that value social connectedness, quality of life and slower ways of being? A central assumption is that fundamental redesign of cultural arrangements is necessary in order to challenge the &quot;culture of speed&quot;.

In an earlier paper in this journal, we argued that current road safety programs and thinking are constructed within a paradigm that tends to accept existing cultural arrangements. The current paper is a sequel to the earlier one, and outlines significant policy themes emerging from a research project on a holistic approach to road safety. Two overarching themes include the importance of leadership for policy change and implementation, and addressing the more transformative aspects of intervening in a system. A distinction can be drawn between ''deep'' sustainable change, which usually requires fundamental redesign of the systems involved, and ''shallow'' adaptive change. Examples of deep change discussed include the much wider application of mobility management, a strong shift to active travel and public transport, and a reconsideration of how time is structured in society, as with the adoption of ''Slow Cities'' principles. Transformational leadership can draw on a variety of ''knowledge cultures'', which can all share in collective decision-making and possible actions for the future. We discuss especially leadership at the worldview, organisational, and community levels. Vision Zero approaches are valuable, but need to be integrated with a common vision for a sustainable transport system developed in conjunction with energy, transport, health, environment, and education agencies. In addition, Vision Zero approaches can be assisted by greater attention to and questioning of embedded cultural practices and behaviour.

We propose a software prototype based upon annotations management in palliative ward of an oncology hospital in which dealing with patients' state and evolutions is a complex organizational task. We develop a 5 years empirical investigation that is giving us broad and deep insights to characterize activity and offer an effective support for group decision making and collaborative activity of caregivers. We based our conception of annotation tool on the observations of the rich writing practices of medical professionals. We rely on the innovative strategy of intermediate management to introduce a new technology able to bridge heterogeneous valuable data flows that address both management support and activity support into a single tool.

We first show that the optimal and undominated outcomes of an unconstrained (and possibly cyclic) CP-net are the solutions of a set of hard constraints. We then propose a new algorithm for finding the optimal outcomes of a constrained CPnet which makes use of hard constraint solving. Unlike previous algorithms, this new algorithm works even with cyclic CP-nets. In addition, the algorithm is not tied to CP-nets, but can work with any preference formalism which produces a preorder over the outcomes. We also propose an approximation method which weakens the preference ordering induced by the CP-net, returning a larger set of outcomes, but provides a significant computational advantage. Finally, we describe a weighted constraint approach that allows to find good solutions even when optimals do not exist.

This article reports on findings from a longitudinal study of leadership in the context of a region-wide school renewal effort entitled the Bay Area School Reform Collaborative (BASRC). BASRC&#39;s theory of action is multifaceted, incorporating a focus on distributed leadership, continual inquiry into practice, and collective decision-making at the school. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative data sources suggests the use of an inquiry process is centrally important to building capacity for school improvement, and a vehicle for developing and distributing leadership. Within a sample of 16 schools where reform processes are most mature, the principal&#39;s role shifts to focus more narrowly on key personnel issues, framing questions and supporting inquiry processes. Findings provide evidence of the efficacy of policy strategies rooted in new understandings of school leadership.

Simple evaluation frameworks lend themselves to clear specification. As governments and others increasingly recognise the interconnectedness of initiatives in achieving a wide range of outcomes (the so-called 'triple bottom line') and build these broad outcomes into the measurement of performance, the task of the evaluator becomes ever more complex. Complex evaluation requires more flexible frameworks, analysis and presentation so that information is exposed rather than concelaed and that judgements are made transparently and by those who have been entrusted with the responsibility of doing so. Indeed, we can no longer consider the process and content of evaluation in isolation from its presentation. Conventional socio-economic and multi-criteria frameworks, for so long the staple of public sector evaluation in areas such as infrastructure investment and market-based service provision (such as public transport) have consistently had difficulty in addressing the triple bottom line, usually relegating social and environmental impacts to the twilight zone of 'externalities' and resorting to sensitivity analysis where judgements are made. This paper discusses issues raised by the triple bottom line requirements, how they are being addressed in evaluation practice, including some specific examples, and what further developments are on the horizon.

Simple evaluation frameworks lend themselves to clear specification. As governments and others increasingly recognise the interconnectedness of initiatives in achieving a wide range of outcomes (the so-called &apos;triple bottom line&apos;) and build these broad outcomes into the measurement of performance, the task of the evaluator becomes ever more complex. Complex evaluation requires more flexible frameworks, analysis and presentation so that information is exposed rather than concelaed and that judgements are made transparently and by those who have been entrusted with the responsibility of doing so. Indeed, we can no longer consider the process and content of evaluation in isolation from its presentation. Conventional socio-economic and multi-criteria frameworks, for so long the staple of public sector evaluation in areas such as infrastructure investment and market-based service provision (such as public transport) have consistently had difficulty in addressing the triple bott...

This paper addresses a collective decision model based on interacting adaptive agents that learn from their experiences by a Hebbian learning mechanism. The decision making process makes use of emotionrelated valuing of decision options on the one hand based on predictive loops through feeling states, and on the other hand based on contagion. The resulting collective decision making process is analysed from the perspective of learning speed and rationality. It is shown how the collectiveness amplifies both learning speed and rationality of the decisions.

This paper presents a notion for developing Organizational Decision Support Systems (ODSS). The lens used is to see ODSS as a specialization of Social Decision Support Systems (SDSS) and a generalization of Group Decision Support Systems (GDSS). A unit decision process can be raised by any person in a organizational whole, the organization itself or some sub-organization. The decision process can use a given formalism coherent with the idea that as the contributions from people in the decision process expands, so does the space of available perceptions (P), the space of available actions (A), strategies (S), and options (O), the space of available criteria (C) of valuation of options (V), leading to decision. Atomic decision processes link in the global decision process of the organization. Potential benefits, shortcomings and needed technologies are indicated as well as prospects of development.

Collective behavior based on self-organization has been shown in group-living animals from insects to vertebrates. These findings have stimulated engineers to investigate approaches for the coordination of autonomous multirobot systems based on self-organization. In this experimental study, we show collective decision-making by mixed groups of cockroaches and socially integrated autonomous robots, leading to shared shelter selection. Individuals, natural or artificial, are perceived as equivalent, and the collective decision emerges from nonlinear feedbacks based on local interactions. Even when in the minority, robots can modulate the collective decision-making process and produce a global pattern not observed in their absence. These results demonstrate the possibility of using intelligent autonomous devices to study and control self-organized behavioral patterns in group-living animals.

Avaliacao do processo de tomada de decisao na determinacao de rotas em Acromyrmex subterraneus (Forel, 1893) (Hymenoptera, Formicidae). O forrageamento e imprescindivel a sobrevivencia e reproducao dos animais, devendo ser entendido como um imperativo biologico. Operarias de formigas cortadeiras utilizam de forma sinergica informacoes individual (memoria) e social (feromonio de trilha) a fim de selecionar e transportar o alimento. Este transporte ocorre por meio de uma rede de trilhas quimicas e fisicas, estas por sua vez apresentam varias bifurcacoes. Em cada bifurcacao a tomada de decisao sobre qual rota seguir pode estar relacionada com (i) o comprimento de cada ramo da trilha, (ii) a qualidade do alimento ao final de cada ramo e (iii) a hierarquia estabelecida na utilizacao das informacoes disponiveis. Investigou-se a influencia destes tres fatores na determinacao de rotas de forrageamento utilizando sistemas de trilhas artificiais. Verificou-se a escolha de rotas em tres pontos...

Written as a chapter in the Handbook of Development Economics, edited by Dani Rodrik and Mark Rosenzweig to be published by North Holland. We are grateful to Frederico Finan and Robert Putnam for providing us with their data to Mar a Ang elica Bautista for her research assistance and Dani Rodrik for his detailed comments on an earlier draft.

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members of the society called followers. Hence, opinion leaders might have a considerable impact on the behavior of markets and other social agglomerations being made up of individual actors choosing among a number of alternatives. For marketing or policy purposes it appears to be interesting to investigate the effect of different opinion leader-follower structures in markets or any other collective decision-making situations in a society. We study a two-action model in which the members of a society are to choose one action, for instance, to buy or not to buy a certain joint product, or to vote yes or no on a specific proposal. Each of the actors has an inclination to choose one of the actions. By definition opinion leaders have some power over their followers, and they exercise this power by influencing the behavior of their followers, i.e. their choice of action. After all actors have chosen their actions, a decision-making mechanism determines the collective choice resulting out of the individual choices. Making use of bipartite digraphs we introduce novel satisfaction and power scores which allow us to analyze the actors' satisfaction and power with respect to the collective choice for societies with different opinion leader-follower structures. Moreover, we study common dictator and opinion leader properties of the above scores and illustrate our findings for a society with five members.

Animals frequently have to decide between alternative resources and in social insects these individual choices produce a colony-level decision. The choice of nest site is a particularly critical decision for a social insect colony to make, but the decision making process has still only been studied in a few species. In this study, we investigated nest selection by the Pharaoh's ant, Monomorium pharaonis, a species renowned for its propensity to migrate and its use of multi-component trail pheromones to organise decision-making in other contexts. When presented with the choice of familiar and novel nests of equal quality in a Y setup, colonies preferentially migrated towards the familiar nest, suggesting a form of colony-level 'memory' of potential nest sites. However, if the novel nest was superior to the familiar nest, then colonies began migrating initially to the familiar nest, but then redirected their migration to the superior quality novel nest. This may be an effective method of reducing colony exposure while searching for an optimum nest site. Branches that had previously led to a selected nest were attractive to ants in subsequent migrations, suggesting that trail pheromones mediate the decision making process. The adaptive, pheromone-based organisation of nest-site selection by Pharaoh's ants matches their ephemeral environment and is likely to contribute to their success as a 'tramp' species.

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This study examined Huguka Radio in Muhanga District in Rwanda to see how radio contributes to socioeconomic development. It helped identify Huguka Radio's socioeconomic benefits and problems. This research also helped the researcher graduate in Masters in Development Studies. The campaign targeted 250 Huguka Radio listeners, journalists, managers, government officials, civil society organizations (CSOs), and media advocates. Slovin's formula determined a sample size of 75 applicants using purposive or judgmental sampling and simple random sampling. Surveys and interviews were utilised to obtain data from Huguka Radio listeners, staff, government officials, civil society organisations, and media advocates. After discussing the research instruments with the supervisor, the researcher confirmed that the questions and substance were valid. To assess reliability, respondents' answers were tested again. Using percentages and frequencies, SPSS descriptive statistics analysed quantitative data. To analyse qualitative data, content analysis was performed. The poll found that 95.2% of respondents thought that radio helps Rwanda's economy, while 92.1% said Huguka Radio does. In particular, 93.3% of respondents believed Huguka Radio promotes agriculture and farming, 94.9 % human rights, and 84.7 % health. The research also revealed that Huguka Radio promotes socioeconomic development through rural forums, accessible language, and community debates. Due to financial constraints, Huguka Radio struggled to promote socioeconomic development. Some respondents noted that this issue limits equipment, professional journalists to work on contract, radio journalists' consistency, and time and area to reach people, especially in rural areas where many Rwandans live. Huguka Radio should collaborate with other broadcasters and keep engaging socioeconomic development partners. After this investigation, the researcher suggested other research subjects, including Financial inability Volume 3 Issue 2, December 2023. p. 122-139. Uwitonze, F.

この論文では, 合理的に失敗した企業の事例としてコダックに注目し, そしてそれ を回避した事例として富士フイルムを取り上げる。これら2つの企業の事例が単な る偶然ではないことを説明するために, 企業が合理的に失敗する可能性があることを取引コスト理論を用いて説明し, それ を回避するためにはダイナミック・ケイパビリティが必要であることを説明する 。さらに, この同じことが数学的にもいえることを明らかにするために, リョーダ ン=ウィリアムソンの数理モデルにダイナミック・ケイパビリティの要素を導入し たモデルを提示する。 Notes 今口忠政教授退任記念号#論文 Genre Journal Article URL 698-20140200-0087 慶應義塾大学学術情報リポジトリ(KOARA)に掲載されているコンテンツの著作権は、それぞれの著作者、学会または出版社/発行者に帰属し、その 権利は著作権法によって保護されています。引用にあたっては、著作権法を遵守してご利用ください。 The copyrights of content available on the KeiO Associated Repository of Academic resources (KOARA) belong to the respective authors, academic societies, or publishers/issuers, and these rights are protected by the Japanese Copyright Act. When quoting the content, please follow the Japanese copyright act.

The purpose of this research was to examine the Apis dorsata distribution and nesting habits in urban Nagpur. According to the findings, there were about 75 nests in urban Nagpur. Among these 73 per cent were active nests and 21 per cent were abandoned nests. The nesting preference was found to be among the tall building (60%). Out of these nests, 30 per cent were found shielded from the rain and wind, 57 per cent exposed and 13 per cent partially protected. It was noted that the A. dorsata's habit of building nests was unaffected by the existence of a nearby body of water, as most of the nests were located away from the waterbody.

Voting rules implemented by various political or economic bodies may be studied with the help of tools that have been developed over many decades in game theory (Felsenthal and Machover 1998). A mathematical theory of indirect voting was devised after World War II by a British psychiatrist and mathematician, Lionel S. Penrose, in the context of a hypothetical distribution of votes in the United Nations General Assembly (Penrose 1946). He introduced the concept of a priori voting power, a quantity measuring the ability of a participant of the voting body to influence the decisions taken. This notion may be also used for analysing rules governing decision taking in the Council of the European Union (EU). It is important to differentiate clearly here between the voting weight of a given country and its potential voting power, the latter reflecting the extent to which it may influence decisions taken by the Council when all possible coalitions between different countries are taken into ...

This paper is thc rcsult of an inlerdisciplinary diatogue, and \ve arc vcry gralelul lor thc encouragemenl and assistance with which so niany colleagucs havc hclpcd us. Wc would like 10 extend our sincerc ihanks lo A. Bonnei (1'alina de Mallorca), F. Dominguez (Frcihurg iin Breisgaui. N.R. Drapcr (Madison. Wisconsin), A. Fidora (Frankfurl atn Main), K. Flasch (Mainz). C. l.ohr (Freiburg im Breisgau). E. Meuthen (Kolnl. U. Roth (Freiburg im Brcisgau). H.G. Sengcr (Kbln). A. Solcr (Barcelona), B. Torsney (Glasgow), and to our Augsburg colleagues F. Abel (Romancc languages), II. Heinz (Practical theology), W. Hupka (Romance languages), H. ImmenkOlter (Church history), W. Reif (Computer sciencc). T. Schcerer (Spanish), B. Schimmelpfennig (Medieval history). A. Unwin (Siaiistics). Copics of ihe manuscripts were kindly provided by thc Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (Cilta del Vaticano). ihc Raimundus-l.ullus-lnslitule (Frciburg im Brcisgau), ihc Baycrischc Slaatsbihliothek (Munich). and thc Sankt Nikolaus-Hospital/Cusanusstifl (Bernkastel-Kues). ' (AEP f. 1 lv. 1.12): Wc are unccrtain whcther primu.s mcans (he niost scnior person, Ihe person highest in rank, or ihc foremost person.

Electronic institutions provide a computational analogue of human institutions to engineer open environments in which agents can interact in an autonomous way while complying with the norms of an institution. We survey the currently available infrastructures to engineer open environments as electronic institutions: (i) AMELI, the coordination infrastructure which is core to run EIs; and (ii) the conversion of the AMELI infrastructure to run over a peer to peer network. We also discuss the type of applications that both infrastructures target at.

Animal and robotic collective behaviours can exhibit complex dynamics that require multi-level descriptions. Here, we are interested in developing a multi-level modeling framework for the use of robots in studies about animal collective decision-making. In this context, using robots can be useful for validating models in silico, inducing calibrated repetitive stimuli to trigger animal responses or modulating and controlling animal collective behaviour. However, designing appropriate biomimetic robotic behaviour faces a major challenge: how to go from the collective decision dynamics observed with animals to an actual algorithmic implementation in robots. In previous work, this was mainly done by hand, often by taking inspiration from human-designed models. Typically, models of behaviour are either macroscopic (differential equations of the population dynamics) or microscopic (explicit spatio-temporal state of each individual). Only microscopic models can easily be implemented as robot controllers. Here, we address the problem of automating the design of lower level description models that can be implemented in robots and exhibit the same collective dynamics as a given higher level model. We apply evolutionary algorithms to simultaneously optimise the parameters of models accounting for different levels of description. This methodology is applied to an experimentally validated shelterselection problem solved by gregarious insects and robots. We successfully design and calibrate automatically both a microscopic and a hybrid model exhibiting the same dynamics as a macroscopic one. Our framework can be used for multi-level modeling of collective behaviour in animal or robot populations and bio-hybrid systems.

Iván Barreda(a), Aurora García(a)(b), Nikolaos Georgantzís(a)(b) ¤ , Joaquín Andaluz(c), and Agustín Gil(c). LINEEX 11/00 Working Paper on Experimental Economics and Political Decision Making (a)Universitat Jaume I -Castellón (b)LINEEX -Valencia

For agent-based modelling of collective phenomena individual agent behaviours can be modelled either from an agent-internal perspective, in the form of relations involving internal states of the agent, or from an agentexternal, behavioural perspective, in the form of input-output relations for the agent, abstracting from internal states. Illustrated by a case study on collective decision making, this paper addresses how the two types of agent models can be related to each other. First an internal agent model for collective decision making is presented, based on neurological principles. It is shown how by an automated systematic transformation a behavioural model can be obtained, abstracting from the internal states. In addition, an existing behavioural agent model for collective decision making incorporating principles on social diffusion is described. It is shown under which conditions and how by an interpretation mapping the obtained abstracted behavioural agent model can be related to this existing behavioural agent model for collective decision making.

In this paper, we study the problem of collective decision-making over combinatorial domains. We focus on a particular social choice rule, namely Smith/Minimax. We introduce a distributed protocol for collective decision-making, which is general enough and does not restrict the choice of preference representation languages. The final decision chosen is guaranteed to be a Smith member, and is sufficiently close to the Smith/Minimax candidate. Moreover, it enables distributed decision-making and significantly reduces the amount of dominance testings (individual outcome comparisons) that each agent needs to conduct, as well as the number of pairwise comparisons.

The median voter hypothesis has been central to an extensive literature on consequences of income distribution. For example, it has been proposed that greater inequality is associated with lower growth, because of the greater redistribution that is sought by the median voter when income distribution is less equal. There have however been no proper tests of the median-voter hypothesis concerning redistribution, because of previous absence of data on factor income distribution (that is, incomes before taxes and transfers) across households, and thus on the gains by poorer households from redistribution. The study reported in this paper is based on the required data, with 79 observations drawn from household budget surveys from 24 democracies. The results strongly support the conclusion that countries with greater inequality of factor income redistribute more to the poor. This is so even when we control for the share of the elderly in the population and for pension transfers. The evidence that the median-voter hypothesis adequately describes the collectivechoice mechanism is however considerably weaker. Although middle-income groups gain more/or lose less through redistribution in countries where initial (factor) income distribution is more unequal, this regularity is all but lost when, by excluding pensions, we look only at explicit redistributive social transfers from which the middle classes contemporaneously gain little.This leaves us searching for alternative explanations: do middle-classes gain from transfers in the long-run even if not contemporeneously?, or is the median voter hypothesis, based on direct democracy, a proper representation of the the mechanisms of collectivedecision making in representative democracy? JEL classification: D31, E62

There is a great deal of plausibility to the standard view that if one is rational and it is clear at the time of action that a certain move, say M 1 , would serve one's concerns better than any other available move, then one will, as a rational agent, opt for move M 1. Still, this view concerning rationality has been challenged at least in part because it seems to conflict with our considered judgments about what it is rational to do in cases of temptation that share the structure of Warren Quinn's self-torturer case. I argue that there is a way to accomodate our considered judgments about the relevant cases of temptation without giving up the standard view or dismissing, as in some way rationally defective, the concerns of the agents in the relevant cases. My reasoning relies on the idea that, at least in some cases, whether an action serves one's concerns well depends on what action(s) or course(s) of action it is part of. In the final section of the paper, I explain how this idea sheds light on an important source of frustration in collective decision-making. KEY WORDS. collective decision-making, planning, practical deliberation, rationality, temptation, the puzzle of the self-torturer

A well-known model in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors who are able to affect the behavior of their followers. Hence, opinion leaders have some power over their followers, and they can exercise this power by influencing their followers choice of action. We study a two-action model for a society with opinion leaders. We assume that each member of the society has an inclination to choose one of these actions and that the collective choice is made by simple majority of the actions chosen by each member. For this model we axiomatize satisfaction and power scores, which allow us to investigate the effects of different opinion leader-follower structures. Résumé Un modèle bien connu en sociologie et gestion est celui du leadership d'opinion. Les leaders d'opinion sont des acteurs qui peuvent influer sur les comportements de leurs disciples. En conséquence, les leaders d'opinion ont un certain pouvoir sur leurs disciples et ils peuvent exercer ce pouvoir en influençant le choix d'action de leurs disciples. Nousétudions un modèle de deux actions pour une société avec des leaders d'opinion. Nous supposons que chaque membre de la société a une inclination de choisir une des actions et que le choix collectif est fait par la majorité simple des actions choisies par chaque membre. Pour ce modèle nous axiomatisons les scores de satisfaction et de pouvoir, ce qui nous permet d'examiner les effets des différentes structures de leader d'opinion-disciples.

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members of the society called followers. Hence, opinion leaders might have a considerable impact on the behavior of markets and other social agglomerations being made up of individual actors choosing among a number of alternatives. For marketing or policy purposes it appears to be interesting to investigate the effect of different opinion leader-follower structures in markets or any other collective decision-making situations in a society. We study a two-action model in which the members of a society are to choose one action, for instance, to buy or not to buy a certain joint product, or to vote yes or no on a specific proposal. Each of the actors has an inclination to choose one of the actions. By definition opinion leaders have some power over their followers, and they exercise this power by influencing the behavior of their followers, i.e. their choice of action. After all actors have chosen their actions, a decision-making mechanism determines the collective choice resulting out of the individual choices. Making use of bipartite digraphs we introduce novel satisfaction and power scores which allow us to analyze the actors' satisfaction and power with respect to the collective choice for societies with different opinion leader-follower structures. Moreover, we study common dictator and opinion leader properties of the above scores and illustrate our findings for a society with five members.