Bounded Multi-agent Reasoning: Actualizing Distributed Knowledge

The idealizations resulting from the use of Kripke semantics in Epistemic Logic are inherited by formalizations of group epistemic notions. For example, distributed knowledge (DK) is often taken to reflect the potential knowledge of a group: what agents would know if they had unbounded means of communication and deductive ability. However, this does not specify whether/how this potential can be actualized, especially since real people are not unbounded reasoners. Inspired by experiments on group reasoning, we identify two dimensions of actualizing DK: communication and inference. We build a dynamic framework with effortful actions accounting for both, combining impossible-worlds semantics and action models, and we provide a method for extracting a sound and complete axiomatization.