Group intention is social choice with commitment

Abstract

An agent intends g if it has chosen to pursue goal g an is committed to pursuing g . How do groups decide on a common goal? Social epistemology offers two views on collective attitudes: according to the summative approach, a group has attitude p if all or most of the group members have the attitude p; according to the non-summative approach, for a group to have attitude p it is required that the members together agree that they have attitude p. The summative approach is used extensively in multi-agent systems. We propose a formalization of non-summative group intentions, using social choice to determine the group goals. We use judgment aggregation as a decision-making mechanism and a multi-modal multi-agent logic to represent the collective attitudes, as well as the commitment and revision strategies for the groups intentions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.