Heuristics in Argumentation: A Game-Theoretical Investigation

Abstract

This paper provides a game-theoretical investigation on how to determine optimal strategies in dialogue games for argumentation. To make our ideas as widely applicable as possible, we adopt an abstract dialectical setting and model dialogues as extensive games with perfect information where optimal strategies are determined by preferences over outcomes of the disputes. In turn, preferences are specified in terms of expected utility combining the probability of success of arguments with the costs and benefits associated to arguments.