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A Semantical Approach to Equilibria and Rationality

  • Dusko Pavlovic
Conference paper
Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 5728)

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.

Keywords

Nash Equilibrium Game Theory Monoidal Category Response Distribution Semantical Approach 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009

Authors and Affiliations

  • Dusko Pavlovic
    • 1
  1. 1.Kestrel Institute and Oxford UniversityUK

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