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13Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (edited book)Amsterdam University Press. 2008.This volume is a collects papers originally presented at the 7th Conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT), held at the University of Liverpool in July 2006. LOFT is a key venue for presenting research at the intersection of logic, economics, and computer science, and this collection gives a lively and wide-ranging view of an exciting and rapidly growing area.
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103Common belief with the logic of individual beliefMathematical Logic Quarterly 46 (1): 49-52. 2000.The logic of common belief does not always reflect that of individual beliefs. In particular, even when the individual belief operators satisfy the KD45 logic, the common belief operator may fail to satisfy axiom 5. That is, it can happen that neither is A commonly believed nor is it common belief that A is not commonly believed. We identify the intersubjective restrictions on individual beliefs that are incorporated in axiom 5 for common belief
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44Rationality and Coordination, Bicchieri Cristina. Cambridge University Press, 1994, xiii + 270 pages (review)Economics and Philosophy 11 (2): 359. 1995.
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96Axiomatic characterization of the AGM theory of belief revision in a temporal logicArtificial Intelligence 171 (2-3): 144-160. 2007.Since belief revision deals with the interaction of belief and information over time, branching-time temporal logic seems a natural setting for a theory of belief change. We propose two extensions of a modal logic that, besides the next-time temporal operator, contains a belief operator and an information operator. The first logic is shown to provide an axiomatic characterization of the first six postulates of the AGM theory of belief revision, while the second, stronger, logic provides an axiom…Read more
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29Reply to `social cost and Groves mechanisms'Economic Notes 31 173-176. 2002.In my 1992 paper in Economic Notes, I argued that the traditional heuristic interpretation of taxes in the pivotal mechanism (in terms of the utility loss imposed by the taxed individual on the rest of society) is not correct, since it takes into account only the effect that the individual has on the decision concerning the project and disregards the effect that the same individual has on the taxes paid by the other members of society. Campbell criticizes my observation on two grounds
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94Can good news lead to a more pessimistic choice of action?Theory and Decision 25 (2): 123-136. 1988.Adapting a definition introduced by Milgrom (1981) we say that a signal about the environment is good news relative to some initial beliefs if the posterior beliefs dominate the initial beliefs in the sense of first-order stochastic dominance (the assumption being that higher values of the parameter representing the environment mean better environments). We give an example where good news leads to the adoption of a more pessimistic course of action (we say that action a, reveals greater pessimis…Read more
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130Modal logic and game theory: Two alternative approachesRisk Decision and Policy 7 309-324. 2002.Two views of game theory are discussed: (1) game theory as a description of the behavior of rational individuals who recognize each other’s rationality and reasoning abilities, and (2) game theory as an internally consistent recommendation to individuals on how to act in interactive situations. It is shown that the same mathematical tool, namely modal logic, can be used to explicitly model both views.
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50Intensity of competition and the choice between product and process innovationInternational Journal of Industrial Organization 16 (4): 495-510. 1998.Two questions are examined within a model of vertical differentiation. The first is whether cost-reducing innovations are more likely to be observed in regimes of more intense or less intense competition. Following Delbono and Denicolo (1990) and Bester and Petrakis (1993) we compare two identical industries that differ only in the regime of competition: Bertrand versus Cournot. Since Cournot competition leads to lower output and higher prices, it can be thought of as a regime of less intense co…Read more
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124The Logic of Belief PersistenceEconomics and Philosophy 13 (1): 39-59. 1997.The principle of belief persistence, or conservativity principle, states that ’\Nhen changing beliefs in response to new evidence, you should continue to believe as many of the old beliefs as possible' (Harman, 1986, p. 46). In particular, this means that if an individual gets new information, she has to accommodate it in her new belief set (the set of propositions she believes), and, if the new information is not inconsistent with the old belief set, then (1) the individual has to maintain all …Read more
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68Rational choice and agm belief revisionArtificial Intelligence 173 (12-13): 1194-1203. 2009.We establish a correspondence between the rationalizability of choice studied in the revealed preference literature and the notion of minimal belief revision captured by the AGM postulates. A choice frame consists of a set of alternatives , a collection E of subsets of (representing possible choice sets) and a function f : E ! 2 (representing choices made). A choice frame is rationalizable if there exists a total pre-order R on..
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Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory  Loft 8 (edited book)Springer Berlin Heidelberg. 2010.
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54Editorial Introduction to the Special Issue LOFT SevillaJournal of Philosophical Logic 42 (6): 795-798. 2013.
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44Reply to VilksEconomics and Philosophy 10 (1): 115. 1994.In his note Arnis Vilks raises two criticisms concerning my paper "The Logic of Rational Play in Extensive Games". The author gives two examples: one to show that my logic "is inconsistent.
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85A syntactic approach to rationality in games with ordinal payoffsIn Giacomo Bonanno, Wiebe van der Hoek & Michael Wooldridge (eds.), Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory, Amsterdam University Press. 2008.We consider strategic-form games with ordinal payoffs and provide a syntactic analysis of common belief/knowledge of rationality, which we define axiomatically. Two axioms are considered. The first says that a player is irrational if she chooses a particular strategy while believing that another strategy is better. We show that common belief of this weak notion of rationality characterizes the iterated deletion of pure strategies that are strictly dominated by pure strategies. The second axiom s…Read more
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51Synchronic information, knowledge and common knowledge in extensive gamesResearch in Economics 53 (1): 77-99. 1999.Restricting attention to the class of extensive games defined by von Neumann and Morgenstern with the added assumption of perfect recall, we specify the information of each player at each node of the game-tree in a way which is coherent with the original information structure of the extensive form. We show that this approach provides a framework for a formal and rigorous treatment of questions of knowledge and common knowledge at every node of the tree. We construct a particular information part…Read more
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30Prediction in Branching Time LogicMathematical Logic Quarterly 47 (2): 239-248. 2001.When we make a prediction we select, among the conceivable future descriptions of the world, those that appear to us to be most plausible. We capture this by means of two binary relations, ≺c and ≺p: if t1 and t2 are points in time, we interpret t1 ≺ct2 as sayingthat t2 is in the conceivable future of t1, while t1 ≺pt2 is interpreted to mean that t2 isin the predicted future of t1. Within a branching-time framework we propose the following notion of “consistency of prediction”. Suppose that at t…Read more
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51Memory of Past Beliefs and ActionsStudia Logica 75 (1): 7-30. 2003.Two notions of memory are studied both syntactically and semantically: memory of past beliefs and memory of past actions. The analysis is carried out in a basic temporal logic framework enriched with beliefs and actions.
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99Introduction to the special issue of economics and philosophy on neuroeconomicsEconomics and Philosophy 24 (3): 301-302. 2008.ABSTRACT The past fifteen years or so have witnessed considerable progress in our understanding of how the human brain works. One of the objectives of the fast-growing field of neuroscience is to deepen our knowledge of how the brain perceives and interacts with the external world. Advances in this direction have been made possible by progress in brain imaging techniques and by clinical data obtained from patients with localized brain lesions. A relatively new field within neuroscience is neuroe…Read more
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140Belief revision in a temporal frameworkIn Krzysztof Apt & Robert van Rooij (eds.), New Perspectives on Games and Interaction, Amsterdam University Press. 2008.The theory of belief revision deals with (rational) changes in beliefs in response to new information. In the literature a distinction has been drawn between belief revision and belief update (see [6]). The former deals with situations where the objective facts describing the world do not change (so that only the beliefs of the agent change over time), while the letter allows for situations where both the facts and the doxastic state of the agent change over time. We focus on belief revision and…Read more
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89How to make sense of the com M on P ri or assumption under incomplete informationInternational Journal of Game Theory 28 (3): 409-434. 1999.The Common Prior Assumption (CPA) plays an important role in game theory and the economics of information. It is the basic assumption behind decision-theoretic justifications of equilibrium reasoning in games (Aumann, 1987, Aumann and Brandenburger, 1995) and no-trade results with asymmetric information (Milgrom and Stokey, 1982). Recently several authors (Dekel and Gul, 1997, Gul, 1996, Lipman, 1995) have questioned whether the CPA is meaningful in situations of incomplete information, where th…Read more
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63AGM Belief Revision in Dynamic GamesIn Krzysztof Apt (ed.), Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK XIII), . 2011.Within the context of extensive-form (or dynamic) games, we use choice frames to represent the initial beliefs of a player as well as her disposition to change those beliefs when she learns that an information set of hers has been reached. As shown in [5], in order for the revision operation to be consistent with the AGM postulates [1], the player’s choice frame must be rationalizable in terms of a total pre-order on the set of histories. We consider four properties of choice frames and show tha…Read more
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51Review of Cristina Bicchieri's rationality and coordination (review)Economics and Philosophy 11 (2): 359-366. 1995.In her book Rationality and coordination (Cambridge University Press, 1994) Cristina Bicchieri brings together (and adds to) her own contributions to game theory and the philosophy of economics published in various journals in the period 1987-1992. The book, however, is not a collection of separate articles but rather a homogeneous unit organized around some central themes in the foundations of non-cooperative game theory. Bicchieri’s exposition is admirably clear and well organized. Somebody wi…Read more
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72On Stalnaker's Notion of Strong Rationalizability and Nash Equilibrium in Perfect Information GamesTheory and Decision 45 (3): 291-295. 1998.Counterexamples to two results by Stalnaker (Theory and Decision, 1994) are given and a corrected version of one of the two results is proved. Stalnaker's proposed results are: (1) if at the true state of an epistemic model of a perfect information game there is common belief in the rationality of every player and common belief that no player has false beliefs (he calls this joint condition âstrong rationalizabilityâ), then the true (or actual) strategy profile is path equivalent to a Nash e…Read more
London School of Economics
PhD, 1985
Davis, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Other Academic Areas |