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65Introduction to the special issue of economics and philosophy on ambiguity aversionEconomics and Philosophy 25 (3): 247-248. 2009.The paradigm for modelling decision-making under uncertainty has undoubtedly been the theory of Expected Utility, which was first developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern (1944) and later extended by Savage (1954) to the case of subjective uncertainty. The inadequacy of the theory of Subjective Expected Utility (SEU) as a descriptive theory was soon pointed out in experiments, most famously by Allais (1953) and Ellsberg (1961). The observed departures from SEU noticed by Allais and Ellsberg beca…Read more
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72Guest Editors' IntroductionJournal of Philosophical Logic 41 (1): 1-5. 2012.The contributions to the Special Issue on Multiple Belief Change, Iterated Belief Change and Preference Aggregation are divided into three parts. Four contributions are grouped under the heading "multiple belief change" (Part I, with authors M. Falappa, E. Fermé, G. Kern-Isberner, P. Peppas, M. Reis, and G. Simari), five contributions under the heading "iterated belief change" (Part II, with authors G. Bonanno, S.O. Hansson, A. Nayak, M. Orgun, R. Ramachandran, H. Rott, and E. Weydert). These pa…Read more
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39Filtered Belief Revision: Syntax and SemanticsJournal of Logic, Language and Information 31 (4): 645-675. 2022.In an earlier paper [Rational choice and AGM belief revision, _Artificial Intelligence_, 2009] a correspondence was established between the set-theoretic structures of revealed-preference theory (developed in economics) and the syntactic belief revision functions of the AGM theory (developed in philosophy and computer science). In this paper we extend the re-interpretation of those structures in terms of one-shot belief revision by relating them to the trichotomous attitude towards information s…Read more
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400The Material Conditional is Sufficient to Model DeliberationErkenntnis 88 (1): 325-349. 2021.There is an ongoing debate in the philosophical literature whether the conditionals that are central to deliberation are subjunctive or indicative conditionals and, if the latter, what semantics of the indicative conditional is compatible with the role that conditionals play in deliberation. We propose a possible-world semantics where conditionals of the form “if I take action _a_ the outcome will be _x_” are interpreted as material conditionals. The proposed framework is illustrated with famili…Read more
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308Logics for Belief as Maximally Plausible PossibilityStudia Logica 108 (5): 1019-1061. 2020.We consider a basic logic with two primitive uni-modal operators: one for certainty and the other for plausibility. The former is assumed to be a normal operator, while the latter is merely a classical operator. We then define belief, interpreted as “maximally plausible possibility”, in terms of these two notions: the agent believes \ if she cannot rule out \ ), she judges \ to be plausible and she does not judge \ to be plausible. We consider four interaction properties between certainty and pl…Read more
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21Introduction to the Special Issue on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT12)Studia Logica 107 (3): 451-455. 2019.
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298Game TheoryCreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2018.This is a two-volume set that provides an introduction to non-cooperative Game Theory. Volume 1 covers the basic concepts, while Volume 2 is devoted to advanced topics. The book is richly illustrated with approximately 400 figures. It is suitable for both self-study and as the basis for an undergraduate course in game theory as well as a first-year graduate-level class. It is written to be accessible to anybody with high-school level knowledge of mathematics. At the end of each chapter there i…Read more
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600Decision MakingCreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. 2017.This text provides an introduction to the topic of rational decision making as well as a brief overview of the most common biases in judgment and decision making. "Decision Making" is relatively short (300 pages) and richly illustrated with approximately 100 figures. It is suitable for both self-study and as the basis for an upper-division undergraduate course in judgment and decision making. The book is written to be accessible to anybody with minimum knowledge of mathematics (high-school level…Read more
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35Introduction to the Special Issue on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision TheoryStudia Logica 107 (3): 451-455. 2019.
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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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67Rational 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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84A 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
London School of Economics
PhD, 1985
Davis, California, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Other Academic Areas |