Life Of Agent Research Articles

Feeling the right way: Normative influences on people's use of emotion concepts

It is generally assumed that emotion concepts are purely descriptive. However, recent investigations suggest that the concept of happiness includes information about the morality of the agent's life. In this study, we argue that normative influences on emotion concepts are not restricted to happiness and are not about moral norms. In a series of studies, we show that emotion attribution is influenced by whether the agent's psychological and bodily states fit the situation in which they are experienced. People consider that emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling therightway.

Buffered local search for efficient memetic agent-based continuous optimization

In this paper, a memetic search in classic and agent-based evolutionary algorithms are discussed. A local search is applied in an innovative way; namely, during an agent's life and in a classic way during the course of reproduction. Moreover, in order to efficiently utilize the computing power available, an efficient mechanism based on caching parts of the fitness function in the local search is proposed. The experimental results obtained for selected high-dimensional benchmark functions (with 5000 dimensions) show the apparent advantage of the proposed mechanism.

Evolutionary algorithm for structural-parametric optimization of the remote photoplethysmography method

We analyzed a problem of determination of an optimal combination of algorithms and parameters of the remote photoplethysmography method for heart rate estimation. To solve this problem we developed an evolutionary algorithm implementing an adaptive reinforcement learning. The optimal solution of the problem of the remote photoplethysmography was obtained with the aid of an original criterion combining the mean square error with the dutation of agent's life cycle.

On the Existence of Duties to the Self (and Their Significance for Moral Philosophy)

Contemporary philosophers generally ignore the topic of duties to the self. I contend that they are mistaken to do so. The question of whether there are such duties, I argue, is of genuine significance when constructing theories of practical reasoning and moral psychology. In this essay, I show that much of the potential importance of duties to the self stems from what has been called the “second‐personal” character of moral duties—the fact that the performance of a duty is “owed to” someone. But this is problematic, as there is reason to doubt whether a person can genuinely owe to herself the performance of an action. Responding to this worry, I show that temporal divisions within an agent's life enable her to relate to herself second‐personally, in the way required by morality. The upshots, I argue, are that we need an intra‐personal theory of justice that specifies the extent of a person's authority over herself, and that we need to rethink our theories of moral emotions in order to specify how an individual ought to respond to attacks on her interests and autonomy that she herself perpetrates.

World Trade Organization judicialization and preference convergence in EU trade policy: making the agent's life easier

Some feared that judicialization in the World Trade Organization (WTO) would decrease WTO members' propensity to support multilateral trade liberalization. Yet, in 2001 WTO members launched a new round of multilateral trade negotiations, fervently supported by the European Union (EU) despite the influence of domestic protectionist forces. This contribution offers an explanation of why judicialization elicited increased convergence of policy preferences between a liberalizing agent (Commission) and multiple principals (economic interests). I identify three judicialization-led rationales for this: the empowerment of exporters relative to protectionist forces; the enhanced attractiveness of the WTO as an institutional location for international regulatory standards; and the strengthening of incentives to engage positively in negotiations to offset the likely costs of adverse panel rulings. I show the plausibility of this argument through an empirical analysis of EU politics in three negotiation areas in the Doha Round: services; agriculture; and the ‘Singapore issues’.

Endogenous business cycles and dynamic inefficiency

This paper explores how the occurrence of local indeterminacy and endogenous business cycles relates to dynamic inefficiency, as defined by Malinvaud (1953), Phelps (1965) and Cass (1972). We follow Reichlin (1986) and Grandmont (1993) by considering a two‐period overlapping generations model of capital accumulation with labor–leisure choice into the first‐period of an agent's life and consumption in both periods. We first show that local indeterminacy and Hopf bifurcation are necessarily associated with a capital–labor ratio that is, at steady state, larger than the Golden Rule level. Consequently, paths converging asymptotically towards the steady state are shown to be dynamically inefficient, as there always exists another trajectory that starts with the same initial conditions and produces more aggregate consumption at all future dates. More surprising, however, is our main result showing that stable orbits, generated around a dynamically inefficient steady state through a supercritical Hopf bifurcation, may, in contrast, be dynamically efficient.

Housing Tenure and Wealth Distribution in Life-Cycle Economies

Common practice in the housing and wealth distribution literature has proceeded as if the modeling of housing rental markets was unnecessary due to renters' relative low levels of wealth and the small fraction they represent in the total population. This paper shows, however, that their inclusion matters substantially when dealing with wealth concentration over the life cycle. Renters are concentrated in the poorer and younger groups. This concentration results in a pattern of housing wealth concentration over an agent's life that is decreasing, with a slope as steep as that of nonhousing (or financial) wealth. The author constructs an overlapping-generations economy with a housing rental market that is consistent with this fact.

RIGHTS, MORAL AND ENFORCEABLE: A REPLY TO SALADIN MECKLED-GARCIA

In the paper to which Saladin Meckled-Garcia has responded so thoughtfully, I proposed that rights should be viewed not as moral claims, but as effectively enforceable claims that make a practical difference to people's lives. When an agent or her representatives are unable effectively to enforce a claim to some state of affairs, I argue that she does not have a right to it. I stress, however, that if we approve of the claim she is trying to defend we may say that she ought to have a right to it, that is, that she ought to have an effectively enforceable claim. For example, a prisoner who is being beaten up does not have a right not to be tortured, though we are very likely to agree that she ought to have a right-that she should have effective protection from her torturers. Following Meckled-Garcia, I shall call this the Enforcement View. What advantages does the Enforcement View have? As Meckled-Garcia allows, one of its benefits is that it exposes what Onora O'Neill has called the 'empty rhetoric' of some rights talk. Rights are not secured, on this view, by merely acknowledging that agents possess morally legitimate claims of various sorts; we also have to ensure that these claims can be made good, so that possession of a right makes a practical difference to an agent's life. In this way, we avoid the irony of announcing that a group of famine victims has a right to food, or that a group of women has a right to abortion, in circumstances where neither group has a significant chance of getting what they have are said to have a right to. There are also at least three further benefits of this view, which Meckled-Garcia does not mention. First, as Raymond Geuss has pointed out, appeals to moral rights tend to obscure the difference between claims and moral judgments. Someone who says (in a jurisdiction where there is no provision for it) that gays have a right to same-sex marriage is voicing their belief that it ought to be possible to enforce this claim effectively, and is thus

Previdência social e bem estar no Brasil

Este artigo busca avaliar os impactos do Regime Geral de Previdência Social (RGPS) sobre o bem-estar da sociedade. A análise será feita por meio da simulação numérica de um modelo de gerações superpostas, calibrado para reproduzir fatos da economia brasileira, contemplando o fato de que o período de vida dos agentes é incerto e incorporando tanto a hipótese de restrição ao crédito quanto a existência de incerteza sobre a renda dos indivíduos. Dentre as conclusões obtidas destaca-se a de que um sistema de previdência do tipo repartição pode apresentar ganhos de bem-estar em relação a um sistema onde a previdência seja financiada pela poupança dos indivíduos. Porém, este resultado depende do valor atribuído para o fator de desconto intertemporal.

Asset pricing with endogenous aspirations

We develop the classical asset pricing analysis assuming that the representative agent is characterized by endogenous aspirations. The agent's aspirations at time t are given by a linear combination of the standard of living (habit) at time t (the “forward” part) and of the conditional expectation at t of the habit at the end of the agent's life (the “backward” part). With this process we capture the fact that the agent's preferences are affected by what he plans to do in the future. Under certain conditions, the risk premium turns out to be higher than that obtained with an additive expected utility when both the forward and the backward parts affect the utility negatively.

Moral Incapacity and Huckleberry Finn

Bernard Williams distinguishes moral incapacities – incapacities that are themselves an expression of the moral life – from mere psychological ones in terms of deliberation. Against Williams I claim there are examples of such moral incapacity where no possible deliberation is involved – that an agent's incapacity may be a primitive feature or fact about their life. However Michael Clark argues that my claim here leaves the distinction between moral and psychological incapacity unexplained, and that an adequate understanding of the kind of examples I suggest must involve at least some implicit reference to deliberation. In this paper I attempt to meet Clark's objection and further clarify my account of primitive moral incapacities by considering an example from Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. What this example shows, I argue, is how our characterization of an agent's response as a moral incapacity turns not on the idea of deliberation but on the way certain primitive incapacities for action are connected to a larger pattern of response in an agent's life, a pattern of response that itself helps to constitute our conception of that agent's character and the moral life more generally.

Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?

Virtue ethics is standardly taught and discussed as a distinctive approach to the major questions of ethics, a third major position alongside Utilitarian and Kantian ethics. I argue that this taxonomy is a confusion. Both Utilitarianism and Kantianism contain treatments of virtue, so virtue ethics cannot possibly be a separate approach contrasted with those approaches. There are, to be sure, quite a few contemporary philosophical writers about virtue who are neither Utilitarians nor Kantians; many of these find inspiration in ancient Greek theories of virtue. But even here there is little unity. Although certain concerns do unite this disparate group (a concern for the role of motives and passions in good choice, a concern for character, and a concern for the whole course of an agent's life), there are equally profound disagreements, especially concerning the role that reason should play in ethics. One group of modern virtue-theorists, I argue, are primarily anti-Utilitarians, concerned with the plurality of value and the susceptibility of passions to social cultivation. These theorists want to enlarge the place of reason in ethics. They hold that reason can deliberate about ends as well as means, and that reason can modify the passions themselves. Another group of virtue theorists are primarily anti-Kantians. They believe that reason plays too dominant a role in most philosophical accounts of ethics, and that a larger place should be given to sentiments and passions -- which they typically construe in a less reason-based way than does the first group. The paper investigates these differences, concluding that it is not helpful to speak of “virtue ethics,” and that we would be better off characterizing the substantive views of each thinker -- and then figuring out what we ourselves want to say.