Related papers: A Theory of Ex Post Rationalization

This paper is an original attempt to understand the foundations of economic reasoning. It endeavors to rigorously define the relationship between subjective interpretations and objective valuations of such interpretations in the context of…

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 paper motivates the study of decision theory as necessary for aligning smarter-than-human artificial systems with human interests. We discuss the shortcomings of two standard formulations of decision theory, and demonstrate that they…

In economic theory, an agent chooses from available alternatives -- modeled as a set. In decisions in the field or in the lab, however, agents do not have access to the set of alternatives at once. Instead, alternatives are represented by…

Emergent collective group processes and capabilities have been studied through analysis of transactive memory, measures of group task performance, and group intelligence, among others. In their approach to collective behaviors, these…

The systematic biases seen in people's probability judgments are typically taken as evidence that people do not reason about probability using the rules of probability theory, but instead use heuristics which sometimes yield reasonable…

As we know, there is a controversy about the decision making under risk between economists and psychologists. We discuss to build a unified theory of risky choice, which would explain both of compensatory and non-compensatory theories. For…

Justification logics are modal-like logics with the additional capability of recording the reason, or justification, for modalities in syntactic structures, called justification terms. Justification logics can be seen as explicit…

People act upon their desires, but often, also act in adherence to implicit social norms. How do people infer these unstated social norms from others' behavior, especially in novel social contexts? We propose that laypeople have intuitive…

Justification logics are modal-like logics with the additional capability of recording the reason, or justification, for modalities in syntactic structures, called justification terms. Justification logics can be seen as explicit…

I study robust comparative statics for risk-averse subjective expected utility (SEU) maximizers. Starting with a finite menu of actions totally ordered by sensitivity to risk, I identify the transformations of her menu that lead a…

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…

This paper studies how violations of structural assumptions like expected utility and exponential discounting can be connected to basic rationality violations, even though these assumptions are typically regarded as independent building…

For many economic questions, the empirical results are not interesting unless they are strong. For these questions, theorizing before the results are known is not always optimal. Instead, the optimal sequencing of theory and empirics trades…

We consider hundreds of thousands of individual economic transactions to ask: how predictable are consumers in their merchant visitation patterns? Our results suggest that, in the long-run, much of our seemingly elective activity is…

Confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that adversely affects management decisions, and mathematical modelling is an aid to its detailed understanding. Bias in opinion update about the value of a parameter is modelled here assuming that…

Motivated by the psychological literature on the "peak-end rule" for remembered experience, we perform an analysis within a random walk framework of a discrete choice model where agents' future choices depend on the peak memory of their…

Recent decades have seen an interest in prediction problems for which Bayesian methodology has been used ubiquitously. Sampling from or approximating the posterior predictive distribution in a Bayesian model allows one to make inferential…

With recent advances in natural language processing, rationalization becomes an essential self-explaining diagram to disentangle the black box by selecting a subset of input texts to account for the major variation in prediction. Yet,…

Although many investigators affirm a desire to build reasoning systems that behave consistently with the axiomatic basis defined by probability theory and utility theory, limited resources for engineering and computation can make a complete…