Abstract We construct optimal portfolios of mutual funds whose objectives include socially responsible investment (SRI). Comparing these to those constructed from the broader fund universe reveals cost imposing SRI constraint on investors seeking highest Sharpe ratio. This crucially depends investor’s views about asset pricing models and stock-picking skill by managers. To an investor who stron...

Coordination infrastructures have played a central role in the engineering of multi-agent systems (MAS). Although MAS research has produced a number of notable coordination infrastructures of varying features, these have been mainly conceived to host software agents and to facilitate multi-agent programming. Thus, human agents have been mostly kept out of the picture, hence hindering the use of...

We present an approach to social reasoning that integrates prior work on norms and obligations with the BDI approach to agent architectures. Norms and obligations can be used to increase the eficiency of agent reasoning, and their explicit representation supports reasoning about a wide range of behaviour types in a single framework. We propose a modified BDI interpreter loop that takes norms an...

Social neuroscience, often viewed as studying the neural foundations of social cognition, has roots in multiple disciplines. This paper argues that it needs a firmer base in social psychology. First, we outline some major opportunities from social psychology--the power of social context and social motives in shaping human behavior. Second, as the social cognition field moves away from studying ...

In welfare economics the relevance of income mobility has been often highlighted in order to allow for the measurement of equality of opportunity. In this paper we observe that intra and intergenerational income mobility have very few in common and, in particular, only the latter concerns with equality of opportunity. In contrast with existing literature we focus on the former not the latter, a...

According to a widely accepted constraint on the content of intentions, here called the exclusivity constraint, one cannot intend to perform another agent’s action, even if one might be able to intend that she performs it. For example, while one can intend that one’s guest leaves before midnight, one cannot intend to perform her act of leaving. However, Deborah Tollefsen’s (2005) account of joi...

OBJECTIVE To examine the salubrious role of social interaction in modulating the development of allodynia (increased sensitivity to typically innocuous physical stimuli) and depressive-like behavior post peripheral nerve injury in mice. The determination of potential mechanisms that mediate social influences on the behavioral and physiological response to peripheral nerve injury. METHODS Mice...

This paper summarises a research study that investigated the potential of the Queensland secondary school subject Modern History to adopt characteristics of socially critical environmental education (SCEE). The study arose out of my own classroom practice. While teaching Modern History in Queensland schools, I found the dividing line between human problems and environmental ones was often blurr...

Embedding the HCI technology with human preferences and behaviour justifies the attempt of implementing emotional and social intelligence aimed at exceeding the single ability to help the user. In this paper we present an Embodied Conversational Agent’s (ECA’s) architecture and methods useful to interpret the user affective attitude during her dialog with an ECA and behaving 'believably' in its...