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Chapter 2
Group Conflict as Social Contradiction
Daniele Porello, Emanuele Bottazzi, and Roberta Ferrario
2.1
Introduction
This paper provides a number of fundamental elements in order to develop an
ontologically grounded classification of group conflicts. Understanding groups'
behavior is a challenging task that involves a number of disciplines such as game
theory, sociology, and behavioral sciences. We are here interested in the perspective
provided by logic and computational disciplines, in particular our methodology is
related to the analysis of the interaction of a number of heterogeneous agents and
groups that have been developed in the multiagent community (Woolridge
2008
).
The model of agency that is presupposed in this approach is the (belief-desire-
intention) BDI model that allows for developing a mathematical representation of
individual actions, plans, goals, etc. in their relationship with other agents (Bratman
1987
; Georgeff et al.
1999
).
We shall introduce the methodology of
social choice theory (SCT)
in order to
formally grasp the relationship between the beliefs, desires, intentions, preferences,
goals of the individuals belonging to the group and the corresponding attitudes that
we may want to ascribe to the group itself. SCT is a branch of welfare economics
that emerged at the beginning of the past century and that studies how a collective
choice can be derived from individual possibly conflicting choices, by means of fair
aggregation procedures (Taylor
2005
; Gaertner
2006
). SCT has been successfully
applied in economics, political science, and recently in computer science and AI.
In particular, in the area of multiagent systems, SCT has provided the key concepts
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