Foundations of Rational Agency

Over the past decade, rational agency has come to be recognized as a central theme in artificial intelligence. Drawing upon research on rational action and agency in philosophy, logic, game theory, decision theory, and the philosophy of language, this volume represents an advanced, comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of the field of rational agency as it stands today. It covers the philosophical foundations of rational agency, logical and decision-theoretic approaches to rational agency, multi-agent aspects of rational agency (including speech acts, joint plans, and co-operation protocols), and, finally, describes a number of approaches to programming rational agents. Although written from the standpoint of artificial intelligence, this interdisciplinary text should be of interest to researchers in logic, mainstream computer science, the philosophy of rational action and agency, and economics.