On the dynamics of delegation, cooperation, and control: a logical account

  • Authors:
  • Wiebe van der Hoek;Michael Wooldridge

  • Affiliations:
  • The University of Liverpool, UK;The University of Liverpool, UK

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

We present DCL-PC: a dynamic logic of delegation and cooperation. The logical foundation of DCL-PC is CL-PC, a logic for reasoning about cooperation in which the powers of agents and coalitions of agents stem from a distribution of atomic Boolean variables to individual agents - the choices available to coalitions in CL-PC correspond to the possible truth assignments to the propositions they control. The basic modal constructs of CL-PC are of the form "coalition C can cooperate to bring about φ". DCL-PC extends CL-PC with dynamic logic modalities in which atomic programs are of the form "agent i gives proposition p to agent j". By combining these dynamic delegation operators with cooperation modalities, it is possible to reason about delegation and how it affects the power structure within a society. We give two alternative semantics for the logic, (a "direct" semantics, in which we directly represent the distributions of atomic propositions to agents, and a more conventional Kripke semantics), and prove that these semantics are equivalent. We then present a sound and complete axiomatization, and investigate the computational complexity of the model checking and satisfiability problems for DCL-PC.