Related papers: Nontransitive Preferences and Stochastic Rationali…

We compare two different ways of quantization a simple sequential game Cat's Dilemma in the context of the debate on intransitive and transitive preferences. This kind of analysis can have essential meaning for the research on the…

To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…

Preferences play a key role in determining what goals/constraints to satisfy when not all constraints can be satisfied simultaneously. In this work, we study preference-based planning in a stochastic system modeled as a Markov decision…

Actual individual preferences are neither complete (=total) nor antisymmetric in general, so that at least every quasi-order must be an admissible input to a satisfactory choice rule. It is argued that the traditional notion of…

Preferences of individuals are distributions of elements generated by generalized functions. Models of economic decision-making derived from such distributions are consistent with results of physiological experiments, and explain any…

Idiosyncratic tendency to choose one alternative over others in the absence of an identified reason, is a common observation in two-alternative forced-choice experiments. It is tempting to account for it as resulting from the (unknown)…

Income- and price-elasticity of demand quantify the responsiveness of markets to changes in income, and in prices, respectively. Under the assumptions of utility maximization and preference-independence (additive preferences), mathematical…

In stochastic decision problems, one often wants to estimate the underlying probability measure statistically, and then to use this estimate as a basis for decisions. We shall consider how the uncertainty in this estimation can be…

We extend well-known comparative results under expected utility to models of non-expected utility by providing novel conditions on local utility functions. We illustrate how our results parallel, and are distinct from, existing results for…

Diversification represents the idea of choosing variety over uniformity. Within the theory of choice, desirability of diversification is axiomatized as preference for a convex combination of choices that are equivalently ranked. This…

This paper develops a framework to study the statistical power of revealed-preference tests. With randomly sampled budgets and mild smoothness of demand, statistical learning implies that any model consistent with the data must approximate…

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…

Behavior of systems that are functions of anticipated behavior of other systems, whose own behavior is also anticipatory but homeostatic and determined by hierarchical ordering, which changes over time, of sets of possible environments that…

Using theory and experiments, this paper shows that the difficulty of making tradeoffs offers a parsimonious explanation for a wide range of behavioral phenomena. We develop a model of imprecise comparisons applicable to multiattribute,…

Organisms and ecological groups accumulate evidence to make decisions. Classic experiments and theoretical studies have explored this process when the correct choice is fixed during each trial. However, we live in a constantly changing…

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…

We propose an axiomatic approach which economically underpins the representation of dynamic preferences in terms of a stochastic utility function, sensitive to the information available to the decision maker. Our construction is iterative…

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)…

Stochastic dominance serves as a general framework for modeling a broad spectrum of decision preferences under uncertainty, with risk aversion as one notable example, as it naturally captures the intrinsic structure of the underlying…

With ever-increasing available data, predicting individuals' preferences and helping them locate the most relevant information has become a pressing need. Understanding and predicting preferences is also important from a fundamental point…