Prof. Dr. Carles Sierra

Professor, Institute of Research on Artificial Intelligence of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research.

 Title of the talk: Agents, Information and Negotiation

Abstract: Successful negotiators prepare by determining their position along five dimensions: Legitimacy, Options, Goals, Independence, and Commitment, (LOGIC). We introduce a negotiation model based on these dimensions and on two primitive concepts: intimacy (degree of closeness) and balance (degree of fairness). The intimacy is a pair of matrices that evaluate both an agent's contribution to the relationship and its opponent's contribution each from an information view and from a utilitarian view across the five LOGIC dimensions. The balance is the difference between these matrices. A relationship strategy maintains a target intimacy for each relationship that an agent would like the relationship to move towards in future. The negotiation strategy maintains a set of Options that are in-line with the current intimacy level, and then tactics wrap the Options in argumentation with the aim of attaining a successful deal and manipulating the successive negotiation balances towards the target intimacy. Summary measures if trust and reputation are also discussed.

Prof. Dr.    Sorin Solomon

Professor, Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Title of the talk: How do Micro-Economic Simple Rules Generate Complex Macro-Economic Behavior? An Agent Based Modelling Approach for Connecting Empirical Facts with Theoretical Predictions

Abstract: For a very long while it was customary in economics and in science in general to formalize mathematically a collection of many similar objects in terms of "representative agents" or "mean field" continuous functions in space and time representing the local average of their individual properties. In fact, this "mean field" / continuum / linear way of thinking is what kept the various scientific domain apart. Indeed, the great conceptual jumps separating the various fields and the accompanying paradoxes connected to the nature of life, intelligence, trade, credit, growth, market, society, culture, arise exactly from the failure of the "mean field" and "average" assumptions. When "More Is Different" (the title of the article published 35 years ago by Nobel Laureate Phil Anderson) the singular, extreme, very rare events become crucial and life emerges from chemistry, conscience from life, social institutions /firms/markets from conscient interacting individuals, economies from firms etc One can think about the "elementary" objects belonging to the "simpler" level (say firms in microeconomics) as the nodes of a network and about the "elementary" interactions between them as the links of the network. The dynamics of the entire system (say macroeconomics) is then emerging from the interactions of the individual links and nodes. The global features of the resulting network correspond to the collective properties of the emerging system: (quasi-)disconnected network components correspond to (almost-)independent emergent economic branches; scaling properties of the network correspond to power laws in the firms distribution, long-lived (meta-stable) network features correspond to critical slowing down activity. The knowledge of the collective emerging features of the network allows one to devise methods to expedite by orders of magnitude desired processes (or to delay or stop un-wanted ones). I will describe the application of this approach to a few specific economic systems and confront the results to empirical data.