Related papers: The nature of individual choice: a formalism for u…
In consumer theory, ranking available objects by means of preference relations yields the most common description of individual choices. However, preference-based models assume that individuals: (1) give their preferences only between pairs…
The notion of preferences plays an important role in many disciplines including service robotics which is concerned with scenarios in which robots interact with humans. These interactions can be favored by robots taking human preferences…
When trying to solve a computational problem, we are often faced with a choice between algorithms that are guaranteed to return the right answer but differ in their runtime distributions (e.g., SAT solvers, sorting algorithms). This paper…
Most ethical work is done at a low level of formality. This makes practical moral questions inaccessible to formal and natural sciences and can lead to misunderstandings in ethical discussion. In this paper, we use Bayesian inference to…
This survey reviews recent developments in revealed preference theory. It discusses the testable implications of theories of choice that are germane to specific economic environments. The focus is on expected utility in risky environments;…
Harsanyi (1955) showed that the only way to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference which satisfies certain desirable properties is ``utilitarianism'', whereby the social utility function is a weighted average of…
The definition of preferences assigned to individuals is a concept that concerns many disciplines, from economics, with the search of an acceptable outcome for an ensemble of individuals, to decision making an analysis of vote systems. We…
Social choice theory is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual preferences, interests, or welfare to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense. We introduce a new criterion for social choice protocols…
Classical decision theory models behaviour in terms of utility maximisation where utilities represent rational preference relations over outcomes. However, empirical evidence and theoretical considerations suggest that we need to go beyond…
We use decision theory to compare variants of differential privacy from the perspective of prospective study participants. We posit the existence of a preference ordering on the set of potential consequences that study participants can…
Instead of testing for unanimous agreement, I propose learning how broad of a consensus favors one distribution over another (of earnings, productivity, asset returns, test scores, etc.). Specifically, given a sample from each of two…
Real-world engineering systems are typically compared and contrasted using multiple metrics. For practical machine learning systems, performance tuning is often more nuanced than minimizing a single expected loss objective, and it may be…
Several rules for social choice are examined from a unifying point of view that looks at them as procedures for revising a system of degrees of belief in accordance with certain specified logical constraints. Belief is here a social…
Various tasks in decision making and decision support systems require selecting a preferred subset of a given set of items. Here we focus on problems where the individual items are described using a set of characterizing attributes, and a…
The standard rational choice model describes individuals as making choices by selecting the best option from a menu. A wealth of evidence instead suggests that individuals often filter menus into smaller sets - consideration sets - from…
Methods for choosing from a set of options are often based on a strict partial order on these options, or on a set of such partial orders. I here provide a very general axiomatic characterisation for choice functions of this form. It…
Random utility theory models an agent's preferences on alternatives by drawing a real-valued score on each alternative (typically independently) from a parameterized distribution, and then ranking the alternatives according to scores. A…
In this paper an interesting application of mathematics in economics is presented: the formulation of the theory of consumer basic problem, grounded on the concept of preferences relation and operationalized with optimization tools.
We pursue an inverse approach to utility theory and consumption & investment problems. Instead of specifying an agent's utility function and deriving her actions, we assume we observe her actions (i.e. her consumption and investment…
This paper considers the scenario in which there are multiple institutions, each with a limited capacity for candidates, and candidates, each with preferences over the institutions. A central entity evaluates the utility of each candidate…