Over recent years there has been a worldwide trend towards smaller government government departments being under increased pressure to privatise or outsource parts of their operation and to move towards a more independent corporatised model. The corporatised model is seen to involve the organisation moving away from being a direct arm of the government, acting more as a business entity in their...

Do boundedly rational agents repeatedly playing a symmetric game with a unique symmetric equilibrium learn over time to play it? In this paper we model the dynamic interaction of two types of such agents, experimenters and imitators, whose behavior is characterized by simple rules of thumb. We find that the stochastic process describing their play is stable in the large: it converges globally a...

Apart from these pragmatic goals, the vignette provides a means to look-up the role of any parameters in our formulation of the Bayesian model. A more detailed discussion of the Bayesian model is provided elsewhere [? ]. If you are content with the default settings provided when creating an instance of the XdeParameter class, fitting the model, assessing convergence, and generating alternative ...

This work focuses on standardization and improvement of processes and practices using a combination of methodologies including Agile Methodologies (AM). It was implemented at a Mexican steel manufacturing company using FDD, XP and RUP. The main goal was to improve the software systems production, maintenance and support.

It is impossible to produce systems of any size which do not need to be changed. Once software is put into use, new requirements emerge and existing requirements change as the business running that software changes. Ontogenetic software systems have the ability to evolve dynamically in an autonomous way to meet the user needs and the anticipated and unanticipated changes of requirements. The ev...

John Broome’s Rationality Through Reasoning is a book of tremendous scope, moving from foundational questions about reasons, requirements, and oughts to more general issues concerning the architecture of a rational agent and, especially, the process of reasoning through which such an agent could bring itself to satisfy the requirements of rationality. Although Broome explores a number of these ...

We propose a logical analysis of the concept of typicality, central in human cognition (Rosch,1978). We start from a previously proposed extension of the basic Description Logic ALC with a typicality operator T that allows to consistently represent the attribution to classes of individuals of properties with exceptions (as in the classic example (i)typical birds fly, (ii) penguins are birds but...

This position paper summarizes the contributions resulting from the short term scientific mission (STSM) of the first author, from University Rey Juan Carlos, to the Kings College London. During this scientific mission, we have studied the impact of norms on the sequential decision making of rational agents, and how they can be modelled and quantitatively assessed. For this purpose, we put forw...

Fully rational agents are allowed to optimize over expectations formation technologies in an environment where it is costly to collect and process information. It is shown in a general equilibrium framework that optimization over expectations by rational and forward oriented agents can lead to endogenous instability. Specifically, we illustrate that resulting equilibria can be both chaotic and ...

We define a notion of rational closure for the logic SHIQ, which does not enjoys the finite model property, building on the notion of rational closure introduced by Lehmann and Magidor in [24]. We provide a semantic characterization of rational closure in SHIQ in terms of a preferential semantics, based on a finite rank characterization of minimal models. We show that the rational closure of a ...