The use of belief functions has recently been advocated as an alternative to the use of probability functions in order to represent quantified beliefs. Such a proposal lacked justification. We present a set of requirements that justify the use of belief functions. The assessment of the validity of these requirements provides a tool for assessing the relative value of normative models of subject...

We consider the problem of updating a multi-agent system with a set of conditional norms. A norm comes into effect when its condition becomes true, and imposes either an obligation or a prohibition on an agent which remains in force until a state satisfying a deadline condition is reached. If the norm is violated, a sanction is imposed on the agent. We define a notion of a normative update of a...

This study examines influence and IT in group polarization. Group polarization is the tendency of group members to shift their initial positions to a more extreme direction following discussion. We hypothesize that informational influence is relatively more important than normative influence in causing group members to shift their positions and that IT can be used to enhance the effects of info...

People taking part in argumentativedebates through collective annotations face a highly cognitive taskwhen trying to estimate the group’s global opinion. In order to reduce this effort, we propose in this paper to model such debates prior to evaluating their “social validation.” Computing the degree of global confirmation (resp. refutation) enables the identification of consensual (resp. contro...

This article identifies four factors for consideration in norms-based research to enhance the predictive ability of theoretical models. First, it makes the distinction between perceived and collective norms and between descriptive and injunctive norms. Second, the article addresses the role of important moderators in the relationship between descriptive norms and behaviors, including outcome ex...

Consent to perform a small favor increases a respondent's susceptibility to perform a relatively large favor. This phenomenon, known as the foot-in-the-door effect, is considered to result from induced self-perception changes: the respondent comes to feel helpful for doing the small favor and complies again later out of a desire to maintain the instilled self-view. This study did not find a lin...

YouhadamanagementwhichknewwhatpeopleIemployees]coulddo'which took an interest in them and made demands' There were very strict guidelines dur ingthatt ime.| fyouhada.,conference' ' thatwentonha|f thenight, there werenoexcusesfornotarr iv ingatther ight t imethefol |owingmorning. l f you did not arrive on time you got a public reprimand' You had-to be there at 8 o'clock in the morning, in fresh ...

Introduction Giles has proposed Speech Accommodation Theory (SAT) to account for language usage between individuals (see e.g. Giles et al., 1977). That theory is concerned with determining what motivates an individual to de-accentuate ethnolinguistic characteristics and converge toward the dominant culture, or to accentuate his/her ethnolinguistic characteristics and diverge from the dominant p...

In this paper, we introduce evidence propagation operations on influence diagrams and a concept of value of evidence, which measures the value of experimentation. Evidence propagation operations are critical for the computation of the value of evidence, general update and inference operations in normative expert systems which are based on the influence diagram (generalized Bayesian network) par...

The environment is an essential component of multi-agent systems and is often used to coordinate the behaviour of individual agents. Recently many languages have been proposed to specify and implement multi-agent environments in terms of social and normative concepts. In this paper, we first introduce a formal setting of multi-agent environment which abstracts from concrete specification langua...