Being and acting rational

Abstract

Rationality alone is insufficient to specify agent design. Using economic theory, we can program agents to behave in ways that maximize their utility while responding to environmental changes. However, economic models for agents, although general in principle, are typically limited in practice because the value functions that are tractable essentially reduce an agent to acting selfishly. Building a stable social system from a collection of agents motivated by self-serving interests is difficult. Finally, understanding rationality and knowledge requires interdisciplinary results from artificial intelligence, distributed computing, economics and game theory, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. A complete theory involves semantic models for knowledge, belief, action, uncertainty; bounded rationality and resource-bounded reasoning; commonsense epistemic reasoning; reasoning about mental states; belief revision; and interactions in multiagent systems.