Learning what others know

Abstract

We propose a number of powerful dynamic-epistemic logics for multi-agent information sharing and acts of publicly or privately accessing other agents’ information databases. The static base of our logics is obtained by adding to standard epistemic logic comparative epistemic assertions, that can express epistemic superiority between groups or individuals, as well as a common distributed knowledge operator (that combines features of both common knowledge and distributed knowledge). On the dynamic side, we introduce actions by which epistemic superiority can be acquired: “sharing all one knows” (by e.g. giving access to one’s information database to all or some of the other agents), as well as more complex informational events, such as hacking. We completely axiomatize several such logics and prove their decidability.