Related papers: Preferences Yielding the "Precautionary Effect"
In most contemporary approaches to decision making, a decision problem is described by a sets of states and set of outcomes, and a rich set of acts, which are functions from states to outcomes over which the decision maker (DM) has…
To study the assumption that the utility maximization hypothesis implicitly adds to consumer theory, we consider a mathematical representation of pre-marginal revolution consumer theory based on subjective exchange ratios. We introduce two…
In most social choice settings, the participating agents express their preferences over the different alternatives in the form of linear orderings. While this clearly simplifies preference elicitation, it inevitably leads to poor…
We examine behavioral axioms in decision theory that are satisfied approximately rather than exactly. We demonstrate that in key domains -- decisions under risk, uncertainty, and intertemporal choice -- behavior that \emph{almost} satisfies…
An analyst observes an agent take a sequence of actions. The analyst does not have access to the agent's information and ponders whether the observed actions could be justified through a rational Bayesian model with a known utility…
Feature selection can facilitate the learning of mixtures of discrete random variables as they arise, e.g. in crowdsourcing tasks. Intuitively, not all workers are equally reliable but, if the less reliable ones could be eliminated, then…
We propose a novel system for action sequence planning based on a combination of affordance recognition and a neural forward model predicting the effects of affordance execution. By performing affordance recognition on predicted futures, we…
The Availability bias, manifested in the over-representation of extreme eventualities in decision-making, is a well-known cognitive bias, and is generally taken as evidence of human irrationality. In this work, we present the first…
The Reverse Stein Effect is identified and illustrated: A statistician who shrinks his/her data toward a point chosen without reliable knowledge about the underlying value of the parameter to be estimated but based instead upon the observed…
Optimizing recommender systems based on user interaction data is mainly seen as a problem of dealing with selection bias, where most existing work assumes that interactions from different users are independent. However, it has been shown…
Using a model of the environment and a value function, an agent can construct many estimates of a state's value, by unrolling the model for different lengths and bootstrapping with its value function. Our key insight is that one can treat…
In the article the necessary and sufficient conditions for a representation of Lipschitz function of two variables as a difference of two convex functions are formulated. An algorithm of this representation is given. The outcome of this…
We develop an overlapping generations model where each agent observes a verifiable private signal about the state and, with positive probability, also receives signals disclosed by his predecessor. The agent then takes an action and decides…
We study the utilitarian distortion of social choice mechanisms under the recently proposed learning-augmented framework where some (possibly unreliable) predicted information about the preferences of the agents is given as input. In…
Affordance theory proposes that the use of an object is intrinsically determined by its physical shape. However, when translated to digital objects, affordance theory loses explanatory power, as the same physical affordances, for example,…
Many biological, psychological and economic experiments have been designed where an organism or individual must choose between two options that have the same expected reward but differ in the variance of reward received. In this way,…
How do we know that a kitchen is a kitchen by looking? Relatively little is known about how we conceptualize and categorize different visual environments. Traditional models of visual perception posit that scene categorization is achieved…
This paper introduces a dual problem to study a continuous-time consumption and investment problem with incomplete markets and stochastic differential utility. For Epstein-Zin utility, duality between the primal and dual problems is…
A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…
We study how a decision-maker can acquire more information from an agent by reducing her own ability to observe what the agent transmits. In a large class of binary-action games, opacity design is just as good as full commitment to actions…