Related papers: Preferences Yielding the "Precautionary Effect"

Behavior of systems that are functions of anticipated behavior of other systems, whose own behavior is also anticipatory but homeostatic and determined by hierarchical ordering, which changes over time, of sets of possible environments that…

This paper investigates whether the decoy effect - specifically the attraction effect - can foster cooperation in social networks. In a lab experiment, we show that introducing a dominated option increases the selection of the target…

Bayesian evidence ratios give a very attractive way of comparing models, and being able to quote the odds on a particular model seems a very clear motivation for making a choice. Jeffreys' scale of evidence is often used in the…

Humans have come to rely on machines for reducing excessive information to manageable representations. But this reliance can be abused -- strategic machines might craft representations that manipulate their users. How can a user make good…

When making decisions under risk, people often exhibit behaviors that classical economic theories cannot explain. Newer models that attempt to account for these irrational behaviors often lack neuroscience bases and require the introduction…

This study proposes a tractable stochastic choice model to identify motivations for prosocial behavior, and to explore alternative motivations of deliberate randomization beyond ex-ante fairness concerns. To represent social preferences, we…

An information cascade is a circumstance where agents make decisions in a sequential fashion by following other agents. Bikhchandani et al., predict that once a cascade starts it continues, even if it is wrong, until agents receive an…

When an algorithm provides risk assessments, we typically think of them as helpful inputs to human decisions, such as when risk scores are presented to judges or doctors. However, a decision-maker may react not only to the information…

The unit selection problem aims to identify a set of individuals who are most likely to exhibit a desired mode of behavior, for example, selecting individuals who would respond one way if encouraged and a different way if not encouraged.…

We present a necessary and sufficient condition for Alt's system to be represented by a continuous utility function. Moreover, we present a necessary and sufficient condition for this utility function to be concave. The latter condition can…

Diversification represents the idea of choosing variety over uniformity. Within the theory of choice, desirability of diversification is axiomatized as preference for a convex combination of choices that are equivalently ranked. This…

There is a consensus that human and non-human subjects experience temporal distortions in many stages of their perceptual and decision-making systems. Similarly, intertemporal choice research has shown that decision-makers undervalue future…

Prior probabilities of clinical hypotheses are not systematically used for clinical trial design yet, due to a concern that poor priors may lead to poor decisions. To address this concern, a conservative approach to Bayesian trial design is…

As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…

Consideration sets play a crucial role in discrete choice modeling, where customers often form consideration sets in the first stage and then use a second-stage choice mechanism to select the product with the highest utility. While many…

This paper investigates a purely qualitative version of Savage's theory for decision making under uncertainty. Until now, most representation theorems for preference over acts rely on a numerical representation of utility and uncertainty…

The consumption function maps current wealth and the exogenous state to current consumption. We prove the existence and uniqueness of a consumption function when the agent has a preference for wealth. When the period utility functions are…

In many settings -- like market research and social choice -- people may be presented with unfamiliar options. Classical mechanisms may perform poorly because they fail to incentivize people to learn about these options, or worse, encourage…

Adaptive populations such as those in financial markets and distributed control can be modeled by the Minority Game. We consider how their dynamics depends on the agents' initial preferences of strategies, when the agents use linear or…

Interactions between pieces of information (entities) play a substantial role in the way an individual acts on them: adoption of a product, the spread of news, strategy choice, etc. However, the underlying interaction mechanisms are often…