Set Of Default Rules Research Articles

Logic-Based Explainable and Incremental Machine Learning

Mainstream machine learning methods lack interpretability, explainability, incrementality, and data-economy. We propose using logic programming (LP) to rectify these problems. We discuss the FOLD family of rule-based machine learning algorithms that learn models from relational datasets as a set of default rules. These models are competitive with state-of-the-art machine learning systems in terms of accuracy and execution efficiency. We also motivate how logic programming can be useful for theory revision and explanation based learning.

Reforming Corporate Governance: What History Can Teach Us

In this article, I briefly review the history of corporate law, and then describe current legal distinctions among organizational forms in order to argue that one of the characteristics that distinguishes corporations from partnership-type forms is the set of default rules that help organizers to lock in capital, without locking in the investors. I argue that such is probably attractive because it allows business organizers to precommit not to withdraw capital from the venture prematurely or capriciously. I then propose that corporate governance reform proposals be distinguished according to whether their purpose and effect is to strengthen the independence and information available to boards, to enhance shareholder voice, or to make it easier for shareholders to exit. If the purpose and effect of a corporate governance reform proposal is to make it easier for shareholders to exit, by, say, requiring boards to submit takeover offers to a shareholder vote, or permitting shareholders to propose and mandate (by election) distributions, dissolution or asset sales, I argue in this paper that such a proposal is at odds with the lock-in function of corporate law. Since business organizers would find it difficult to achieve effective using other currently available organizational forms, eliminating or weakening the potential of the corporate law choice by statutorily requiring corporations to give shareholders such powers would take away an important organizational option that business organizers and investors currently have. This option has been eagerly sought out and used by business organizers in the U.S. for more than 150 years, and appears to be associated with substantial economic innovation and growth. Thus, it seems unwise on the face of it to change the law in ways that would eliminate this option. On the other hand, if the purpose and effect of a corporate governance reform proposal is to enhance the monitoring capabilities of corporate boards, or to facilitate shareholder voice, such a proposal is not obviously at odds with the function of the corporate form, and may well reduce agency costs without unduly subverting the role that the corporate form serves in addressing the team production problem.

Altering Rules, Cumulative Voting, and Venture Capital

Legal scholars have long debated the proper balance between mandatory and default rules in corporate law. One group—the contractarians—maintain that corporate law should function as an off-the-rack set of default rules that approximate, as much as possible, the rules that the transacting parties would have agreed to if bargaining were costless. The contractarians are generally skeptical of mandatory rules because they interfere with the ability of the parties to decide for themselves how to organize their economic relationships. Another group of scholars—the anti-contractarians—have argued that corporate law should seek to achieve certain regulatory objectives separate and apart from the goal of private wealth maximization. In order to achieve these objectives, such as the protection of uninformed investors, these scholars argue that it is necessary that corporate law contain some mandatory rules that cannot be altered by the transacting parties.

Shareholder Litigation by Contract

This Article is about the future of shareholder litigation. Calibrating the amount and form of shareholder litigation is one of the most vexing problems in corporate and securities litigation. An emerging — and controversial — approach is to limit shareholder litigation through terms in corporate charters and bylaws. This Article provides a much-needed framework for courts and legislatures to evaluate these provisions. It develops a theory of corporate contract procedure that looks to the structure and content of substantive corporate law to define the reach of procedural terms. The Article concludes first that state corporate law lends itself to the type of tailored procedure proposed here because substantive corporate law is structured primarily as a set of default rules. Tailored procedure would mirror this enabling structure. At the same time, substantive corporate law provides the (few) mandatory provisions that would limit procedural contracting under this framework. One implication of connecting procedure and substance is that limits depend on the area of law at issue. The connection provides a rationale for the greater use of procedural provisions in disputes over state corporate law. In legal areas characterized by mandatory terms, however, including in securities litigation, the framework provides a basis for resisting their use.

Harmonisation of European Contract Law: Default and Mandatory Rules

This Chapter argues that the current harmonisation of European contract law will eventually fail. Supporters of the harmonisation suggest that the divergence in national contract laws not only generates unnecessary costs for cross-border trade, but also undermines fair competition in the European market. Thus, legal harmonisation is the necessary solution. Unfortunately, the harmonization movement has failed to understand the crucial distinction between default and mandatory rules. The current and proposed harmonization measures have focused on the development of sets of default rules. In fact, divergence in national contract laws is mainly due to differences in their mandatory rules. This harmonisation effort suffers from two major defects. Firstly, it assumes that the national default rules are in need of harmonisation in order to facilitate trans-border transactions. In fact, here is no conclusive empirical evidence that differences in national default rules have retarded European trade. Conversely, several existing studies have indicated the opposite that harmonisation of default rules at the regional level actually increases the complexity of contract law and trans-border trading. Secondly, even if a regional harmonised contract law were produced, it would not provide the certainty needed to warrant the effort due to problems of multi-jurisdictional interpretations. The Chapter concludes that a European contract law regime, at this time and in its current form will lead to an unnecessary layer of legal complexity to European trade.

DISAMBIGUATION VIA DEFAULT RULES UNDER ANSWERING COMPLEX QUESTIONS

We develop the default logic for pragmatic analysis of natural language queries. Ambiguous sentences are considered so that each set of meanings is assigned an extension of default system. The approach is applied to natural language question answering, where even a correct semantic representation needs to be modified in accordance to the set of default rules to better match a knowledge domain.

Reasoning with Sets of Defaults in Default Logic

We present a general approach for representing and reasoning with sets of defaults in default logic, focusing on reasoning about preferences among sets of defaults. First, we consider how to control the application of a set of defaults so that either all apply (if possible) or none do (if not). From this, an approach to dealing with preferences among sets of default rules is developed. We begin with an ordered default theory, consisting of a standard default theory, but with possible preferences on sets of rules. This theory is transformed into a second, standard default theory wherein the preferences are respected. The approach differs from other work, in that we obtain standard default theories and do not rely on prioritized versions of default logic. In practical terms this means we can immediately use existing default logic theorem provers for an implementation. Also, we directly generate just those extensions containing the most preferred applied rules; in contrast, most previous approaches generate all extensions, then select the most preferred. In a major application of the approach, we show how semimonotonic default theories can be encoded so that reasoning can be carried out at the object level. With this, we can reason about default extensions from within the framework of a standard default logic. Hence one can encode notions such as skeptical and credulous conclusions, and can reason about such conclusions within a single extension.

Reforming Corporate Governance: What History Can Teach Us

In this article, I briefly review the history of corporate law, and then describe current legal distinctions among organizational forms in order to argue that one of the characteristics that distinguishes corporations from partnership-type forms is the set of default rules that help organizers to lock in capital, without locking in the investors. I argue that such is probably attractive because it allows business organizers to precommit not to withdraw capital from the venture prematurely or capriciously. I then propose that corporate governance reform proposals be distinguished according to whether their purpose and effect is to strengthen the independence and information available to boards, to enhance shareholder voice, or to make it easier for shareholders to exit. If the purpose and effect of a corporate governance reform proposal is to make it easier for shareholders to exit, by, say, requiring boards to submit takeover offers to a shareholder vote, or permitting shareholders to propose and mandate (by election) distributions, dissolution or asset sales, I argue in this paper that such a proposal is at odds with the lock-in function of corporate law. Since business organizers would find it difficult to achieve effective using other currently available organizational forms, eliminating or weakening the potential of the corporate law choice by statutorily requiring corporations to give shareholders such powers would take away an important organizational option that business organizers and investors currently have. This option has been eagerly sought out and used by business organizers in the U.S. for more than 150 years, and appears to be associated with substantial economic innovation and growth. Thus, it seems unwise on the face of it to change the law in ways that would eliminate this option. On the other hand, if the purpose and effect of a corporate governance reform proposal is to enhance the monitoring capabilities of corporate boards, or to facilitate shareholder voice, such a proposal is not obviously at odds with the function of the corporate form, and may well reduce agency costs without unduly subverting the role that the corporate form serves in addressing the team production problem.

C3C--Code for Cognizant Contracting: A Pathway to the Future of Online Contracting

Despite the global embrace of electronic commerce, there has been a surprising lack of attention to the host of new legal issues raised by online contracting. The attempts by the ALI and NCCUSL to clarify this uncertain legal landscape through the creation of a new uniform set of default rules for online transactions, first in the guise of U.C.C. Article 2B and recently as the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act, come up well short. Not only do these paper codes favor merchants, but they rest on a faulty premise: that a traditional, comprehensive, fixed legal framework, dictated by real space notions of contract law, should mold the future of online transactions. As an alternative, this paper offers a code-based contracting regime called C3C, Code for Cognizant Contracting which, similar to P3P, would provide consumers and merchants with the ability to actually negotiate and consciously agree to contract terms that matched their specific preferences. In light of the yet-untested nature of this technology, however, this paper is left to speculate about the potential costs and benefits of a C3C reality. The analysis ultimately suggests that a code-based framework such as C3C might not only eliminate the current legal uncertainty associated with online transactions, but could also provide a solid foundation for more efficient online contracting in the future.

On the Classification and Existence of Structures in Default Logic1

We investigate possible belief sets of an agent reasoning with default rules. Besides of Reiter’s extensions which are based on a proof-theoretic paradigm (similar to Logic Programming), other structures for default theories, based on weaker or different methods of constructing belief sets are considered, in particular, weak extensions and minimal sets. The first of these concepts is known to be closely connected to autoepistemic expansions of Moore, the other to minimal stable autoepistemic theories containing the initial assumptions. We introduce the concept of stratifed collection of default rules and investigate the properties of the largest stratified subset of the family D, determined by W. We find a necessary and sufficient condition for a weak extension to be an extension in terms of stratification. We prove that for theories (D, W) without extension, the least fixed point of the associated operator (with weak extension or minimal set as a context) is an extension of suitably chosen (D’, W) with D’ ⊆ D. We investigate conditions for existence of extensions and introduce the notion of perfectly-stratified set of default rules and its variant of maximally perfectly-stratified set. Existence of such set of default rules turns out to be equivalent to the existence of extension. Finally, we investigate convergence of algorithm for computing extensions.