Vassar College Digital Library

Vassar Scholarship

Vassar Scholarship, the institutional repository formerly known as Digital Window, reflects the research and scholarly output of the Vassar College community.  It provides access to a variety of collections, including senior theses and projects across a wide range of disciplines.

An exploration of the diary as a medium: during the 17th and 18th centuries

Publication Date
2017-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

Looking through the 17th and 18th centuries and specifically the diaries of Samuel Pepys and William Byrd, I aim to explore the medium specificity in the diary as well as its particular moment in manuscript culture. Being written by hand...

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Armstrong's Axioms and Navigation Strategies

Publication Date
2018-February-02
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

The paper investigates navigability with imperfect information. It shows that the properties of navigability with perfect recall are exactly those captured by Armstrong's axioms from database theory. If the assumption of perfect recall is omitted, then Armstrong's transitivity axiom is...

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Budget-Constrained Dynamics in Multiagent Systems

Publication Date
2017-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

The paper introduces a notion of a budget-constrained multiagent transition system that associates two financial parameters with each transition: a pre-transition minimal budget requirement and a post-transition profit. The paper proposes a new modal language for reasoning about such a...

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Coalition Power in Epistemic Transition Systems

Publication Date
2017-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between coalition strategies and distributed knowledge. Unlike the existing literature, the paper assumes that a strategy must be not only executable but also verifiable. That is, the strategy of a...

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Everyone knows that someone knows: quantifiers over epistemic agents

Publication Date
2018-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

Modal logic S5 is commonly viewed as an epistemic logic that captures the most basic properties of knowledge. Kripke proved a completeness theorem for the first-order modal logic S5 with respect to a possible worlds semantics. A multiagent version of...

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Information Flow under Budget Constraints

Publication Date
2018-February-26
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

Although first proposed in the database theory as properties of functional dependencies between attributes, Armstrong's axioms capture general principles of information flow by describing properties of dependencies between sets of pieces of information. This article generalizes Armstrong's axioms to a...

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Lighthouse principle for diffusion in social networks

Publication Date
2018-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

The article investigates an influence relation between two sets of agents in a social network. It proposes a logical system that captures propositional properties of this relation valid in all threshold models of social networks with the same structure. The...

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Second-Order Know-How Strategies

Publication Date
2018-July-10
Document Type
Department or Program
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Abstract

The fact that a coalition has a strategy does not mean that the coalition knows what the strategy is. If the coalition knows the strategy, then such a strategy is called a know-how strategy of the coalition. The paper proposes...

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Strategic Coalitions with Perfect Recall

Publication Date
2018-February-02
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between distributed knowledge modality and coalition know-how modality. Unlike other similar systems, the one proposed here assumes perfect recall by all agents. Perfect recall is captured in the system by...

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The effect of union coverage on workers’ economic security and resilience to shocks

Publication Date
2022-May-02
Authors
Department or Program
Document Type
Access Level
Abstract

Labor unions have been widely documented as powerful institutions for workers
seeking better compensation and working conditions in their employment. However, there has been relatively little research on whether the benefits that come with
union coverage can displace the need...

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Together We Know How to Achieve: An Epistemic Logic of Know-How

Publication Date
2017-January-01
Document Type
Department or Program
Document Type
Abstract

The existence of a coalition strategy to achieve a goal does not necessarily mean that the coalition has enough information to know how to follow the strategy. Neither does it mean that the coalition knows that such a strategy exists...

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