Related papers: Several Consequences of Optimality
The rational choice theory is based on this idea that people rationally pursue goals for increasing their personal interests. In most conditions, the behavior of an actor is not independent of the person and others' behavior. Here, we…
Reading is a pervasive and cognitively demanding activity that underpins modern human culture. It is a prime instance of a class of tasks where eye movements are coordinated for the purpose of comprehension. Existing theories explain either…
Specialization and hierarchical organization are important features of efficient collaboration in economical, artificial, and biological systems. Here, we investigate the hypothesis that both features can be explained by the fact that each…
Standard economic theory assumes that agents in markets behave rationally. However, the observation of extremely large fluctuations in the price of financial assets that are not correlated to changes in their fundamental value, as well as…
A physicalistic argument can support the idea that cognition is an emergent property driven by dissipation. This argument suggests that cognition arises not from any fiat desire to understand the world, but rather because a certain type of…
Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…
Modern recommendation systems rely on the wisdom of the crowd to learn the optimal course of action. This induces an inherent mis-alignment of incentives between the system's objective to learn (explore) and the individual users' objective…
Many real-world systems are composed of interdependent networks that rely on one another. Such networks are typically designed and operated by different entities, who aim at maximizing their own payoffs. There exists a game among these…
We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…
People are often confronted with problems whose complexity exceeds their cognitive capacities. To deal with this complexity, individuals and managers can break complex problems down into a series of subgoals. Which subgoals are most…
In an information-rich world, people's time and attention must be divided among rapidly changing information sources and the diverse tasks demanded of them. How people decide which of the many sources, such as scientific articles or…
Affordances, a foundational concept in human-computer interaction and design, have traditionally been explained by direct-perception theories, which assume that individuals perceive action possibilities directly from the environment.…
In multimedia crowdsourcing, the requester's quality requirements and reward decisions will affect the workers' task selection strategies and the quality of their multimedia contributions. In this paper, we present a first study on how the…
Algorithms are increasingly used to aid, or in some cases supplant, human decision-making, particularly for decisions that hinge on predictions. As a result, two additional features in addition to prediction quality have generated interest:…
We study a model of a population making a binary decision based on information spreading within the population, which is fully connected or covering a square grid. We assume that a fraction of the population wants to make the choice of the…
We can overcome uncertainty with uncertainty. Using randomness in our choices and in what we control, and hence in the decision making process, could potentially offset the uncertainty inherent in the environment and yield better outcomes.…
As large language models (LLMs) like GPT become increasingly prevalent, it is essential that we assess their capabilities beyond language processing. This paper examines the economic rationality of GPT by instructing it to make budgetary…
As we show using the notion of equilibrium in the theory of infinite sequential games, bubbles and escalations are rational for economic and environmental agents, who believe in an infinite world. This goes against a vision of a self…
Early theories of perception as probabilistic inference propose that uncertainty about the interpretation of sensory input is represented as a probability distribution over many interpretations -- a relatively complex representation.…
We formalize two independent computational limitations that constrain algorithmic intelligence: formal incompleteness and dynamical unpredictability. The former limits the deductive power of consistent reasoning systems while the latter…