On stable social laws and qualitative equilibria

摘要

This paper introduces and investigates the notion of qualitative equilibria, or stable social laws, in the context of qualitative decision making. Previous work in qualitative decision theory has used the maximin decision criterion for modelling qualitative decision making. When several decision-makers share a common environment, a corresponding notion of equilibrium can be defined. This notion can be associated with the concept of a stable social law. This paper initiates a basic study of stable social laws; in particular, it discusses the stability benefits one obtains from using social laws rather than simple conventions, the existence of stable social laws under various assumptions, the computation of stable social laws, and the representation of stable social laws in a graph-theoretic framework.