Related papers: The physics of (ir)rational choice
People rationalize their past choices, even those that were mistakes in hindsight. We propose a formal theory of this behavior. The theory predicts that sunk costs affect later choices. Its model primitives are identified by choice behavior…
Traditional cognitive science rests on a foundation of classical logic and probability theory. This foundation has been seriously challenged by several findings in experimental psychology on human decision making. Meanwhile, the formalism…
When inferring the goals that others are trying to achieve, people intuitively understand that others might make mistakes along the way. This is crucial for activities such as teaching, offering assistance, and deciding between blame or…
This paper studies choice situations in which a decision maker can choose multiple alternatives. Given a menu of available options, the decision maker selects a subset of the menu with certain probabilities. We employ an axiomatic approach…
A simple framework for reasoning under uncertainty and intervention is introduced. This is achieved in three steps. First, logic is restated in set-theoretic terms to obtain a framework for reasoning under certainty. Second, this framework…
We are investigating a paradigm of instability in coalition forming among countries, which indeed is intrinsic to any collection of individual groups or other social aggregations. Coalitions among countries are formed by the respective…
We find ourselves surrounded by a rapidly increasing number of autonomous and semi-autonomous systems. Two grand challenges arise from this development: Machine Ethics and Machine Explainability. Machine Ethics, on the one hand, is…
This work lies in the fusion of experimental economics and data mining. It continues author's previous work on mining behaviour rules of human subjects from experimental data, where game-theoretic predictions partially fail to work.…
The search for a scientific theory of consciousness should result in theories that are falsifiable. However, here we show that falsification is especially problematic for theories of consciousness. We formally describe the standard…
While the philosophical literature has extensively studied how decisions relate to arguments, reasons and justifications, decision theory almost entirely ignores the latter notions and rather focuses on preference and belief. In this…
Unaided human decision making appears to systematically violate consistency constraints imposed by normative theories; these biases in turn appear to justify the application of formal decision-analytic models. It is argued that both claims…
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…
Humans are interactive agents driven to seek out situations with interesting physical dynamics. Here we formalize the functional form of physical intrinsic motivation. We first collect ratings of how interesting humans find a variety of…
We develop a model to study the role of rationality in economics and biology. The model's agents differ continuously in their ability to make rational choices. The agents' objective is to ensure their individual survival over time or,…
We propose a simple model for a binary decision making process on a graph, motivated by modeling social decision making with cooperative individuals. The model is similar to a random field Ising model or fiber bundle model, but with key…
In this paper, we present the possibility of using the Ising like models to explain by Statistical Physics means the connection between the financial discontinuities (herd behavior, bubbles, crashes) and "critical points" in physical of…
The way that people make choices or exhibit preferences can be strongly affected by the set of available alternatives, often called the choice set. Furthermore, there are usually heterogeneous preferences, either at an individual level…
Much of scientific data is collected as randomized experiments intervening on some and observing other variables of interest. Quite often, a given phenomenon is investigated in several studies, and different sets of variables are involved…
Bounded rationality, that is, decision-making and planning under resource limitations, is widely regarded as an important open problem in artificial intelligence, reinforcement learning, computational neuroscience and economics. This paper…
We examine the issue of stability of probability in reasoning about complex systems with uncertainty in structure. Normally, propositions are viewed as probability functions on an abstract random graph where it is implicitly assumed that…