A semantical approach to equilibria and rationality

  • Authors:
  • Dusko Pavlovic

  • Affiliations:
  • Kestrel Institute and Oxford University

  • Venue:
  • CALCO'09 Proceedings of the 3rd international conference on Algebra and coalgebra in computer science
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Game theoretic equilibria are mathematical expressions of rationality. Rational agents are used to model not only humans and their software representatives, but also organisms, populations, species and genes, interacting with each other and with the environment. Rational behaviors are achieved not only through conscious reasoning, but also through spontaneous stabilization at equilibrium points. formal theories of rationality are usually guided by informal intuitions, which are acquired by observing some concrete economic, biological, or network processes. Treating such processes as instances of computation, we reconstruct and refine some basic notions of equilibrium and rationality from some basic structures of computation. It is, of course, well known that equilibria arise as fixed points; the point is that semantics of computation of fixed points seems to be providing novel methods, algebraic and coalgebraic, for reasoning about them.