Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge, Pacific Grove, CA, USA, March 1994

Reasoning about knowledge, once the exclusive arena of philosophical investigation, has in the last two decades become an active field of research in a variety of scientific disciplines. These include artificial intelligence, economics, linguistics, philosophy and theoretical computer science. While the issues arising in the different disciplines share a significant degree of commonality, the separate communities pursued their respective research efforts fairly independently for quite a while. The First Conference on Theoretical Aspects of Reasoning about Knowledge (TARK I) was organized by Joe Halpern in 1986, with the goal of bringing together researchers from these fields to discuss issues of mutual interest. It was followed by TARK conferences in 1988, 1990, 1992, and 1994. This volume represents the program of TARK V, the fifth biennial conference in the series, which was held March 13-16, 1994. All five TARK conferences have been held at the lovely, peaceful campus of the Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California. The TARK conferences have helped bring the interdisciplinary community attending this conference closer together. The program committee consisted of Michael Dunn (Philosophy, Indiana University), Ronald Fagin (Computer Science, IBM Almaden Research Center), Itzhak Gilboa (Economics, Northwestern University), Robert Koons (Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin), Gerhard Lakemeyer (Artificial Intelligence, University of Bonn), Barton Lipman (Economics, Queen's University), Judea Pearl (Artificial Intelligence, UCLA), Brian Skyrms (Philosophy, University of California at Irvine), Mark Tuttle (Computer Science, DEC Cambridge Research Lab), and Lenore Zuck (Computer Science, Yale University). The program committee meeting was held October 23-24, 1993, in Los Gatos, California. The committee carefully considered all of the 83 papers submitted to the conference. Only 21 papers were selected for presentation. In addition, there were 2 invited papers, by Ken Binmore and by Hector Levesque. This volume consists of extended abstracts of those 23 papers. We believe that this volume provides a good interdisciplinary selection of state of the art research on the topic of reasoning about knowledge. Despite the careful job done by the program committee, none of the extended abstracts appearing here was formally refereed, and it is expected that most of them will appear in more polished and complete form in refereed journals. I'd like to thank Karl Shell and Ehud Kalai, the general editors of the Journal of Economic Theory and of Games and Economic Behavior, respectively, for announcing that appearance of abstracts in the TARK V proceedings will not affect the publication of full length versions of these papers in their journals. This made it easier for economists to submit papers to the conference. Grants to help support the conference were provided by the IBM Almaden Research Center, and by Prashant Parikh. Administrative support was provided by the DEC Cambridge Research Lab, the IBM Almaden Research Center, and the NEC Research Institute.