TARK 2003 is the 9th conference on theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge. In its early days TARK explored formal models of knowledge and belief as they arise in disciplines such as computer science, economics, philosophy, and psychology. The recent years however have been very fruitful in establishing further connections between these disciplines. This includes work on resource-bounded reasoning, the design and analysis of protocols and algorithms for non-cooperative environments, computational approaches to game-theoretic problems, nonprobabilistic representations of uncertainty, and causality, among many other areas.The program of TARK 2003 shows the breadth and depth of these connections. In these proceedings the reader will find papers that deal with rationality and knowledge, bridging and combining perspectives taken from computer science, economics, philosophy, linguistics, psychology, and biology. The reader will also find novel approaches to dealing with basic problems in the design and analysis of social and computational mechanisms.In order to develop such a diverse program, the papers were selected after very Careful evaluation by a multi-disciplinaxy program committee consisting of Geir Asheim (Economics, Oslo), Maya Bar Hillel (Psydhology, Hebrew University), Cristina Bicchieri (Decision Sciences and Philosophy, CMU), Craig Boutilier (AI, Toronto), Yossi Feinberg (Economics, Stanford), Daniel Lehmann (Computer Science, ttebrew University), Stephen Morris (Economics, Yale), Motty Perry (Economics, Hebrew Universiity), Avi Pfeffer (AI, Harvard), Ilya Segal (Economics, Stanford), Jeremy Seligman (Philosophy, Auckland ), Brian Skyrms (Philosophy and Economics, Irvine), Moshe Tennenholtz (PC Chair, AI, Technion), Moshe Vardi (Computer Science, Rice), and Frank Veltman (Philosophy, Amsterdam).Important ingredients in the TARK conferences have been the opportunity for informal interactions, and the invited talks and tutorials. In TARK 2003 we are fortunate to have four outstanding invited speakers-- Steven Brams (NYU), Michael Kearns, (University of Pennsylvania), Dov Monderer (Technion), and Wolfgang Spohn (University of Konstanz). This year TARK is being coordinated with NASSLLI (the North American Summer School in Logic, Language and Information), and shares with NASSLLI two tutorials: Algorithmic verification for epistemic logic, by Ron von der Meyden, and Games in informational form, by Dov Monderer.
Rationalizability and minimal complexity in dynamic games
This paper presents a formal epistemic framework for dynamic games in which players, during the course of the game, may revise their beliefs about the opponents' utility functions. We impose two key conditions upon the players' beliefs: (a) throughout ...
Iterated backward inference: an algorithm for proper rationalizability
An important approach to game theory is to examine the consequences of beliefs that agents may have about each other. This paper investigates respect for public preferences. Consider an agent A who believes that B strictly prefers an option a to an ...
Decision-theoretic entropy
We introduce an axiomatic approach to the problem of inferring a complete and transitive weak ordering representing the agent's preferences given a set of observed constraints. The axioms characterize a unique inference rule, which amounts to the ...
Being polite is a handicap: towards a game theoretical analysis of polite linguistic behavior
In this paper I argue for a broad game theoretical perspective on language use. Polite linguistic behavior, in particular, should be taken as rational interaction of conversational partners that each come with their own beliefs and preferences. I argue ...
Towards a general theory of non-cooperative computation
We generalize the framework of non-cooperative computation (NCC), recently introduced by Shoham and Tennenholtz, to apply to cryptographic situations. We consider functions whose inputs are held by separate, self-interested agents. We consider four ...
Incentive compatible multi unit combinatorial auctions
This paper deals with multi-unit combinatorial auctions where there are n types of goods for sale, and for each good there is some fixed number of units. We focus on the case where each bidder desires a relatively small number of units of each good. In ...
Structured interaction in game theory
Over the last several years, a number of authors have developed graphtheoretic or network models for large-population game theory. In such models, each player or organization is represented by a vertex in a graph, and payoffs are determined by the ...
Knowledge in quantum systems
This paper applies to quantum systems a modelling for the logic of knowledge, originally developed for reasoning about distributed systems, but since then applied to game theory, computer security and artificial intelligence. A formal model of quantum ...
Probabilistic algorithmic knowledge
The framework of algorithmic knowledge assumes that agents use deterministic knowledge algorithms to compute the facts they explicitly know. We extend the framework to allow for randomized knowledge algorithms. We then characterize the information ...
Enumerative induction
The paper explains enumerative induction, the confirmation of a law by its positive instances, in ranking theoretic terms. It gives a ranking theoretic explication of a possible law or a nomological hypothesis. And it shows, finally, that such schemes ...
Multi-person unawareness
Standard state-space models, which are widely used in economics, preclude non-trivial forms of unawareness as shown by Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini (1998). We define a generalized state-space model that allows for unawareness. In order to facilitate ...
Belief liberation (and retraction)
We provide a formal study of belief retraction operators that do not necessarily satisfy the (Inclusion) postulate. Our intuition is that a rational description of belief change must do justice to cases in which dropping a belief can lead to the ...
Iterated abduction and conditional coherence
The paper offers a complete probabilistic characterization of the abductive operator axiomatized by Maurice Pagnuco in [11]. The model assumes the axiomatic characterization of Conditional Coherence presented by Lester Dubins in section 3 of [8]. It ...
Dynamic models of coalition formation: fallback vs. build-up
Players are assumed to rank each other as coalition partners. Two processes of coalition formation are defined and illustrated:•Fallback (FB): Players seek coalition partners by descending lower and lower in their preference rankings until some majority ...
How many candidates are needed to make elections hard to manipulate?
In multiagent settings where the agents have different preferences, preference aggregation is a central issue. Voting is a general method for preference aggregation, but seminal results have shown that all general voting protocols are manipulable. One ...
Pure Nash equilibria: hard and easy games
In this paper we investigate complexity issues related to pure Nash equilibria of strategic games. We show that, even in very restrictive settings, determining whether a game has a pure Nash Equilibrium is NP-hard, while deciding whether a game has a ...
Cooperation and coordination in the turn-taking dilemma
In many real-world situations, "cooperation" in the simple sense of the Prisoner's Dilemma is not sufficient for success: instead, cooperators must precisely coordinate more complex behaviors in a noisy environment. We investigate one such model, the ...
Index Terms
- Proceedings of the 9th conference on Theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge