Related papers: A Theory of Ex Post Rationalization
Individuals working towards a goal often exhibit time inconsistent behavior, making plans and then failing to follow through. One well-known model of such behavioral anomalies is present-bias discounting: individuals over-weight present…
In the modern knowledge economy, success demands sustained focus and high cognitive performance. Research suggests that human cognition is linked to a finite resource, and upon its depletion, cognitive functions such as self-control and…
This paper gives a generative model of the interpretation of formal logic for data-driven logical reasoning. The key idea is to represent the interpretation as likelihood of a formula being true given a model of formal logic. Using the…
Algorithmic predictions are increasingly informing societal resource allocations by identifying individuals for targeting. Policymakers often build these systems with the assumption that by gathering more observations on individuals, they…
In economics and psychology, delay discounting is often used to characterize how individuals choose between a smaller immediate reward and a larger delayed reward. People with higher delay discounting rate (DDR) often choose smaller but…
Kinetic exchange models have been successful in explaining the shape of the income/wealth distribution in the economies. However, such models usually make some ad-hoc assumptions when it comes to determining the savings factor. Here, we…
This work proposes a way to align statistical modeling with decision making. We provide a method that propagates the uncertainty in predictive modeling to the uncertainty in operational cost, where operational cost is the amount spent by…
Historically, rational choice theory has focused on the utility maximization principle to describe how individuals make choices. In reality, there is a computational cost related to exploring the universe of available choices and it is…
Predicting another person's upcoming action to build an appropriate response is a regular occurrence in the domain of motor control. In this review we discuss conceptual and experimental approaches aiming at the neural basis of predicting…
Status signaling drives human behavior and the allocation of scarce resources such as mating opportunities, yet the generative mechanisms governing how specific goods, signals, or behaviors acquire prestige remain a puzzle. Classical…
Analyzing decision problems under uncertainty commonly relies on idealizing assumptions about the describability of the world, with the most prominent examples being the closed world and the small world assumption. Most assumptions are…
The evolution of preferences that account for other agents' fitness, or other-regarding preferences, has been modeled with the "indirect approach" to evolutionary game theory. Under the indirect evolutionary approach, agents make decisions…
Despite the obvious advantage of simple life forms capable of fast replication, different levels of cognitive complexity have been achieved by living systems in terms of their potential to cope with environmental uncertainty. Against the…
One way to make decisions under uncertainty is to select an optimal option from a possible range of options, by maximizing the expected utilities derived from a probability model. However, under severe uncertainty, identifying precise…
We study group decision making with changing preferences as a Markov Decision Process. We are motivated by the increasing prevalence of automated decision-making systems when making choices for groups of people over time. Our main…
I model a rational agent who experiences endogenous deadline pressure in the face of a fixed future deadline. The agent holds a resource stock, and opportunities to spend resources arise randomly according to a Poisson process. When the…
Individuals use models to guide decisions, but many models are wrong. This paper studies which misspecified models are likely to persist when individuals also entertain alternative models. Consider an agent who uses her model to learn the…
The aim of this of this paper is to study infinite games and to prove formally some properties in this framework. As a consequence we show that the behavior (the madness) of people which leads to speculative crashes or escalation can be…
In the theory of social choice the research is focused around the projection of individual preference orders to the social preference order. Also, the justification of the preference order formalism begins with the concept of utility i.e.…
In the context of strategic games, we provide an axiomatic proof of the statement Common knowledge of rationality implies that the players will choose only strategies that survive the iterated elimination of strictly dominated strategies.…