Agents can use commitments and self-control to achieve their normative objectives and avoid spontaneous temptations. However, due to weak resolve they may also forgo commitment opportunities and succumb to temptations later. Anticipating such failures, agents may use strategies such as promises and deadlines to help themselves make proper commitments later. We identify such behaviors via a thre...

In biand multilateral interactions, parties frequently make weak commitments, i.e., commitments to future actions from which they may nonetheless deviate at some cost. For example, partners in a strategic alliance usually increase their mutual commitment step by step, where intermediate stages imply only a weak commitment. This paper proposes a new mechanism by which weak commitments lead to im...

Commitments play a central role in multi-agent coordination. However, they are inherently uncertain and it is important to take these uncertainties into account during planning and scheduling. This paper addresses the problem of handling the uncertainty in commitments. We propose a new model of commitment that incorporates the uncertainty, the use of contingency analysis to reduce the uncertain...

This paper provides a logically precise analysis of agreement and disputes in dialogue. The semantics distinguishes among the public commitments of each dialogue agent, including commitments to relational speech acts or rhetorical relations (e.g., Narration, Explanation, Correction). Agreement is defined to be the shared entailments of the agents’ public commitments. We show that this makes pre...