Animal Agency

Agency, Cyberspace, and Social Contract

The social contract has been about rights and responsibilities in human societies. Facebook and its role in manufacturing and sustaining a global social contract, a new “we” is clearly one of the research areas that needs more attention. A new “we” is coming of age in the new age of connectivity and communication with a new outlook toward responsibility and rights at individual and collective l...

Agency Reconsidered

The concept of “agency” in games and other playable media (also referred to as “intention”) has been discussed as a player experience and a structural property of works. We shift focus, considering agency, instead, as a phenomenon involving both player and game, one that occurs when the actions players desire are among those they can take (and vice versa) as supported by an underlying computati...

Myopic Agency

I consider a repeated principal-agent setting in which the agent repeatedly chooses between hidden “long-term” and “short-term” actions. Relative to the long-term action, the short-term action boosts output today but hurts output tomorrow. The optimal contract inducing long-term actions provides a fresh perspective on upward sloping pay scales, severance pay and high-watermark contracts. The my...

Distributed Agency

Distributed Agency is the name of a conceptual framework for describing complex adaptive systems that this paper develops. To understand the complexity of the world in a holistic fashion, the field of Modeling and Simulation is currently lacking a common terminology in which different bodies of knowledge can communicate with each other in a general language. In this work, agency is proposed as ...

The Phenomenology of Joint Action: Self-Agency versus Joint Agency