Download or read book Revealed Preference Theory written by Christopher P. Chambers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The theory of revealed preference has a long, distinguished tradition in economics but lacked a systematic presentation of the theory until now. This book deals with basic questions in economic theory and studies situations in which empirical observations are consistent or inconsistent with some of the best known economic theories.

Download or read book Revealed Preference Theory written by Christopher P. Chambers and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pioneered by American economist Paul Samuelson, revealed preference theory is based on the idea that the preferences of consumers are revealed in their purchasing behavior. Researchers in this field have developed complex and sophisticated mathematical models to capture the preferences that are 'revealed' through consumer choice behavior. This study of consumer demand and behavior is closely tied up with econometrics (especially nonparametric econometrics), where testing the validity of different theoretical models is an important aspect of research. The theory of revealed preference has a very long and distinguished tradition in economics, but there was no systematic presentation of the theory until now. This book deals with basic questions in economic theory, such as the relation between theory and data, and studies the situations in which empirical observations are consistent or inconsistent with some of the best known theories in economics.

Download or read book The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory written by James M. Joyce and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1999-04-13 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book also contains a major new discussion of what it means to suppose that some event occurs or that some proposition is true.

Download or read book Preferences and Decisions written by Salvatore Greco and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-08-28 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decision making is an omnipresent, most crucial activity of the human being, and also of virtually all artificial broadly perceived “intelligent” systems that try to mimic human behavior, reasoning and choice processes. It is quite obvious that such a relevance of decision making had triggered vast research effort on its very essence, and attempts to develop tools and techniques which would make it possible to somehow mimic human decision making related acts, even to automate decision making processes that had been so far reserved for the human beings. The roots of those attempts at a scientific analysis can be traced to the ancient times but – clearly – they have gained momentum in the recent 50 or 100 years following a general boom in science. Depending on the field of science, decision making can be viewed in different ways. The most general view can be that decision making boils down to some cognitive, mental process(es) that lead to the selection of an option or a course of action among several alternatives. Then, looking in a deeper way, from a psychological perspective this process proceeds in the context of a set of needs, preferences, rational choice of an individual, a group of individuals, or even an organization. From a cognitive perspective, the decision making process proceeds in the context of various interactions with the environment.

Download or read book Decision Theory and Rationality written by José Luis Bermúdez and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of rationality is a common thread through the human and social sciences — from political science to philosophy, from economics to sociology, and from management science to decision analysis. But what counts as rational action and rational behavior? José Luis Bermúdez explores decision theory as a theory of rationality. Decision theory is the mathematical theory of choice and for many social scientists it makes the concept of rationality mathematically tractable and scientifically legitimate. Yet rationality is a concept with several dimensions and the theory of rationality has different roles to play. It plays an action-guiding role (prescribing what counts as a rational solution of a given decision problem). It plays a normative role (giving us the tools to pass judgment not just on how a decision problem was solved, but also on how it was set up in the first place). And it plays a predictive/explanatory role (telling us how rational agents will behave, or why they did what they did). This controversial but accessible book shows that decision theory cannot play all of these roles simultaneously. And yet, it argues, no theory of rationality can play one role without playing the other two. The conclusion is that there is no hope of taking decision theory as a theory of rationality.

Download or read book Foundations of Paul Samuelson s Revealed Preference Theory written by Stanley Wong and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2006-01-13 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published over two decades ago, this classic text within the philosophy of economics is a tour de force against revealed preference. It critically examines the research programme carried out by the Nobel Prize winner Paul Samuelson on the revealed preference approach to the theory of consumer behaviour. It also challenges two essential premises: * that the programme has been completed * that the various contributions of Samuelson are mutually consistent. This text contains a new preface by Wong, in which he provides a detailed insight into the origins of his pioneering text, and a new introduction from Philip Mirowski, analyzing the impact The Foundation of Paul Samuelson’s Revealed Preference Theory has had on the discipline of economics as well as explaining why it remains core reading for economists today. The defining statement of economic method, this book will be of interest to economists everywhere.

Download or read book Representation Theorems in Computer Science written by Özgür Lütfü Özçep and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-07-16 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Formal specifications are an important tool for the construction, verification and analysis of systems, since without it is hardly possible to explain whether a system worked correctly or showed an expected behavior. This book proposes the use of representation theorems as a means to develop an understanding of all models of a specification in order to exclude possible unintended models, demonstrating the general methodology with representation theorems for applications in qualitative spatial reasoning, data stream processing, and belief revision. For qualitative spatial reasoning, it develops a model of spatial relatedness that captures the scaling context with hierarchical partitions of a spatial domain, and axiomatically characterizes the resulting relations. It also shows that various important properties of stream processing, such as prefix-determinedness or various factorization properties can be axiomatized, and that the axioms are fulfilled by natural classes of stream functions. The third example is belief revision, which is concerned with the revision of knowledge bases under new, potentially incompatible information. In this context, the book considers a subclass of revision operators, namely the class of reinterpretation operators, and characterizes them axiomatically. A characteristic property of reinterpretation operators is that of dissolving potential inconsistencies by reinterpreting symbols of the knowledge base. Intended for researchers in theoretical computer science or one of the above application domains, the book presents results that demonstrate the use of representation theorems for the design and evaluation of formal specifications, and provide the basis for future application-development kits that support application designers with automatically built representations.

Download or read book Lectures In The Microeconomics Of Choice Foundations Consumers And Producers written by William David Anthony Bryant and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2023-02-17 with total page 779 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: People pursue their own interests, whatever those interests might be. Some people have interests that are narrow and selfish, while others have interests that are broad and altruistic. The idea that people are self-interested underpins all of economic analysis and raises two fundamental questions: 1. How do people choose the actions they think will further their own interests? 2. Can the potentially conflicting interests of different people be made to 'mesh' in some sort of socio-economic equilibrium? This book is devoted to a detailed study of the first question. Its Companion Volume (Economy-Wide Microeconomics: Equilibrium, Optimality, Applications and Tests) makes a detailed study of the second question.Following some foundational remarks, this book studies the Arrow-Debreu theory of consumer choice. That theory supposes people choose so as to maximize a complete, continuous, transitive, and reflexive binary preference relation over a non-empty and compact choice set. The book then studies numerous refinements, generalizations and extensions of each of these restrictions — up to and including recent work on Behavioral theories of choice and choice behaviour when preferences are intransitive/incomplete/discontinuous. Also considered is choice behaviour in environments that are not necessarily compact. A study is also made of intertemporal choice and choice under uncertainty. The study of Arrow-Debreu choice theory and its extensions are presented from the Primal, Dual, and Revealed Preference points of view.Consumers are not the only agents in the economy, as Producers are present as well. Beginning with a study of the Arrow-Debreu idea that producers choose from a convex production set so as to maximize profit, the book considers extensions and generalizations of this framework, particularly to non-convex environments. The study is presented from the Primal and Dual points of view.The final chapter in the book provides a link to its Companion Volume. The Chapter indicates how the theories of consumer and producer choice studied here help inform answers of the second question posed above.Resources are available to instructors who adopt this book. More details at www.worldscientific.com/worldscibooks/10.1142/12789-sm

Download or read book The Dilworth Theorems written by Bogart and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rational Decisions written by Ken Binmore and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2008-12-29 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is widely held that Bayesian decision theory is the final word on how a rational person should make decisions. However, Leonard Savage--the inventor of Bayesian decision theory--argued that it would be ridiculous to use his theory outside the kind of small world in which it is always possible to "look before you leap." If taken seriously, this view makes Bayesian decision theory inappropriate for the large worlds of scientific discovery and macroeconomic enterprise. When is it correct to use Bayesian decision theory--and when does it need to be modified? Using a minimum of mathematics, Rational Decisions clearly explains the foundations of Bayesian decision theory and shows why Savage restricted the theory's application to small worlds. The book is a wide-ranging exploration of standard theories of choice and belief under risk and uncertainty. Ken Binmore discusses the various philosophical attitudes related to the nature of probability and offers resolutions to paradoxes believed to hinder further progress. In arguing that the Bayesian approach to knowledge is inadequate in a large world, Binmore proposes an extension to Bayesian decision theory--allowing the idea of a mixed strategy in game theory to be expanded to a larger set of what Binmore refers to as "muddled" strategies. Written by one of the world's leading game theorists, Rational Decisions is the touchstone for anyone needing a concise, accessible, and expert view on Bayesian decision making.

Download or read book The Mind under the Axioms written by Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2019-09-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Mind under the Axioms reviews two basic ingredients of our understanding of human decisions – conative aspects (preferences) and cognitive aspects (beliefs). These ingredients are axiomatized in modern decision theory in the view to obtain a formally and empirically tractable representation of the decision-maker. The main issue developed in this book is the connection between realistic and testable psychological features and the descriptive component of abstract axioms of rationality. It addresses three main topics for which the interaction between axiomatization and psychology leads to potential new developments in experimental decision-theory and puts strictures on the standard revealed preference methodology prevailing in that field. The possibility of a cardinal representation of preferences is discussed. Different ways of accounting for incomplete preferences, and in which sense, are analysed. Finally, the conditions of separability between preferences and beliefs, such as prescribed by axioms of state-independence, are submitted to actual and potential tests. The book offers a bridge between the disciplines of decision-theory, psychology, and neuroeconomics. It is thus relevant for those, in psychology and cognitive sciences, who are sometimes put off by the high degree of formalism and abstraction in decision-theory, that seems to lie beyond the reach of psychological realism. It also aims to convince those in decision-theory for whom psychological realism and empirical testability should not constrain the modelling enterprise that conceptual clarification can come from attempted experimentation. - Addresses open and evolving theoretical issues in decision-theory, especially from experimental perspectives - Helps researchers understand the psychological and neuroscientific mechanisms for decision-making - Considers how preferences shape beliefs and how beliefs shape preferences - Uncovers the very formal and abstract psychological and behavioral implications that are actually made in contemporary decision-theory

Download or read book Topology and Order written by Leopoldo Nachbin and published by . This book was released on 1965 with total page 132 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Rationality and Operators written by Susumu Cato and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 131 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This unique book develops an operational approach to preference and rationality as the author employs operators over binary relations to capture the concept of rationality. A preference is a basis of individual behavior and social judgment and is mathematically regarded as a binary relation on the set of alternatives. Traditionally, an individual/social preference is assumed to satisfy completeness and transitivity. However, each of the two conditions is often considered to be too demanding; and then, weaker rationality conditions are introduced by researchers. This book argues that the preference rationality conditions can be captured mathematically by “operators,” which are mappings from the set of operators to itself. This operational approach nests traditional concepts in individual/social decision theory and clarifies the underlying formal structure of preference rationality. The author also applies his approach to welfare economics. The core problem of ‘new welfare economics,’ developed by Kaldor, Hicks, and Samuelson, is the rationality of social preference. In this book the author translates the social criteria proposed by those three economists into operational forms, which provide new insights into welfare economics extending beyond ‘new welfare economics.’

Download or read book Readings in Formal Epistemology written by Horacio Arló-Costa and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-06-07 with total page 930 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume presents 38 classic texts in formal epistemology, and strengthens the ties between research into this area of philosophy and its neighbouring intellectual disciplines. The editors provide introductions to five subsections: Bayesian Epistemology, Belief Change, Decision Theory, Interactive Epistemology and Epistemic Logic. 'Formal epistemology' is a term coined in the late 1990s for a new constellation of interests in philosophy, the origins of which are found in earlier works of epistemologists, philosophers of science and logicians. It addresses a growing agenda of problems concerning knowledge, belief, certainty, rationality, deliberation, decision, strategy, action and agent interaction – and it does so using methods from logic, probability, computability, decision and game theory. The volume also includes a thorough index and suggestions for further reading, and thus offers a complete teaching and research package for students as well as research scholars of formal epistemology, philosophy, logic, computer science, theoretical economics and cognitive psychology.

Download or read book The Measurement of Subjective Probability written by Edward J. R. Elliott and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-05-02 with total page 105 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beliefs come in degrees, and we often represent those degrees with numbers. We might say, for example, that we are 90% confident in the truth of some scientific hypothesis, or only 30% confident in the success of some risky endeavour. But what do these numbers mean? What, in other words, is the underlying psychological reality to which the numbers correspond? And what constitutes a meaningful difference between numerically distinct representations of belief? In this Element, we discuss the main approaches to the measurement of belief. These fall into two broad categories-epistemic and decision-theoretic-with divergent foundations in the theory of measurement. Epistemic approaches explain the measurement of belief by appeal to relations between belief states themselves, whereas decision-theoretic approaches appeal to relations between beliefs and desires in the production of choice and preferences.

Download or read book Collective Household Consumption Behavior written by Laurens Cherchye and published by Foundations & Trends. This book was released on 2012-03 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collective Household Consumption Behavior: Revealed Preference Analysis presents a nonparametric `revealed preference' methodology for analyzing collective consumption behavior in practical applications, while possibly accounting for externalities, public consumption and the use of assignable quantity information. Collective Household Consumption Behavior: Revealed Preference Analysis considers two types of collective models: The general collective model considers general preferences of the individual household members, which allow for externalities and public consumption within the household. The special collective models that do not allow for consumption externalities. After the introduction, section 2 sets the stage by introducing the revealed preference characterizations of the unitary model. Section 3 presents a collective model that allows for general individual preferences and discusses its revealed preference characterization. Sections 4 and 5 show how to bring this theoretical characterization to observational data. More specifically, Section 4 introduces the mixed integer programming characterizations for special collective models that impose restrictions on the household members' preferences. Section 5 does the same for the general collective model. Throughout Section 2 to Section 5, the authors illustrate the most relevant concepts by means of numerical examples. In Section 6 we subsequently illustrate our main results for data drawn from the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey.

Download or read book Decision Theory with a Human Face written by Richard Bradley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-10-26 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When making decisions, people naturally face uncertainty about the potential consequences of their actions due in part to limits in their capacity to represent, evaluate or deliberate. Nonetheless, they aim to make the best decisions possible. In Decision Theory with a Human Face, Richard Bradley develops new theories of agency and rational decision-making, offering guidance on how 'real' agents who are aware of their bounds should represent the uncertainty they face, how they should revise their opinions as a result of experience and how they should make decisions when lacking full awareness of, or precise opinions on relevant contingencies. He engages with the strengths and flaws of Bayesian reasoning, and presents clear and comprehensive explorations of key issues in decision theory, from belief and desire to semantics and learning. His book draws on philosophy, economics, decision science and psychology, and will appeal to readers in all of these disciplines.