Related papers: Non-rationalizable Individuals, Stochastic Rationa…
Our goal is to develop a partial ordering method for comparing stochastic choice functions on the basis of their individual rationality. To this end, we assign to any stochastic choice function a one-parameter class of deterministic choice…
Personalized decision making targets the behavior of a specific individual, while population-based decision making concerns a sub-population resembling that individual. This paper clarifies the distinction between the two and explains why…
Econometricians have usefully separated study of estimation into identification and statistical components. Identification analysis, which assumes knowledge of the probability distribution generating observable data, places an upper bound…
Nontransitive choices have long been an area of curiosity within economics. However, determining whether nontransitive choices represent an individual's preference is a difficult task since choice data is inherently stochastic. This paper…
We show that many bounded rationality patterns of choice can be alternatively represented as testable models of limited consideration, and we elicit the features of the associated unobserved consideration sets from the observed choice.…
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…
Humans display a tendency to pay more attention to bad outcomes, often in a disproportionate way relative to their statistical occurrence. They also display euphorism, as well as a preference for the current state of affairs (status quo…
We characterize the identified sets of a wide range of stochastic choice models, including random utility, various models of boundedly-rational behavior, and dynamic discrete choice. In each of these settings, we show two distributions over…
All possible types of deterministic choice behavior are classified by their degree of irrationality. This classification is performed in three steps: (1) select a benchmark of rationality, for which this degree is zero; (2) endow the set of…
Public opinion polling is usually done by random sampling from the entire population, treating individual opinions as independent. In the real world, individuals' opinions are often correlated, e.g., among friends in a social network. In…
Individual choices often depend on the order in which the decisions are made. In this paper, we expose a general theory of measurable systems (an example of which is an individual's preferences) allowing for incompatible (non-commuting)…
This paper extends the concept of informative selection, population distribution and sample distribution to a spatial process context. These notions were first defined in a context where the output of the random process of interest consists…
We study the subtlety of optimal paternalism when a utilitarian planner has the power to design a discrete choice set for a heterogeneous population with bounded rationality. We first consider the planning problem in abstraction. We show…
Positivity, the assumption that every unique combination of confounding variables that occurs in a population has a non-zero probability of an action, can be further delineated as deterministic positivity and stochastic positivity. Here, we…
Given only aggregate choice data and limited information about how menus are distributed across the population, we describe what can be inferred robustly about the distribution of preferences (or more general decision rules). We strengthen…
Human reasoning often involves working over limited information to arrive at probabilistic conclusions. In its simplest form, this involves making an inference that is not strictly entailed by a premise, but rather only likely given the…
In many areas of data mining, data is collected from humans beings. In this contribution, we ask the question of how people actually respond to ordinal scales. The main problem observed is that users tend to be volatile in their choices,…
Stochastic processes offer a flexible mathematical formalism to model and reason about systems. Most analysis tools, however, start from the premises that models are fully specified, so that any parameters controlling the system's dynamics…
Determining an individual's strategic reasoning capability based solely on choice data is a complex task. This complexity arises because sophisticated players might have non-equilibrium beliefs about others, leading to non-equilibrium…
The problem of individualization is recognized as crucial in almost every field. Identifying causes of effects in specific events is likewise essential for accurate decision making. However, such estimates invoke counterfactual…