Download or read book Handbook of Utility Theory written by Salvador Barbera and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2004-03-31 with total page 636 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The standard rationality hypothesis is that behaviour can be represented as the maximization of a suitably restricted utility function. This hypothesis lies at the heart of a large body of recent work in economics, of course, but also in political science, ethics, and other major branches of the social sciences. Though this hypothesis of utility maximization deserves our continued respect, finding further refinements and developing new critiques remain areas of active research. In fact, many fundamental conceptual problems remain unsettled. Where others have been resolved, their resolutions may be too recent to have achieved widespread understanding among social scientists. Last but not least, a growing number of papers attempt to challenge the rationality hypothesis head on, at least in its more orthodox formulation. The main purpose of this Handbook is to make more widely available some recent developments in the area. Yet we are well aware that the final chapter of a handbook like this can never be written as long as the area of research remains active, as is certainly the case with utility theory. The editors originally selected a list of topics that seemed ripe enough at the time that the book was planned. Then they invited contributions from researchers whose work had come to their attention. So the list of topics and contributors is largely the editors' responsibility, although some potential con tributors did decline our invitation. Each chapter has also been refereed, and often significantly revised in the light of the referees' remarks.

Download or read book Foundations of Utility and Risk Theory with Applications written by Bernt P. Stigum and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-03-09 with total page 487 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume we present some o~ the papers that were delivered at FUR-82 - the First International Con~erence on Foundations o~ Utility and Risk Theory in Oslo, June 1982. The purpose o~ the con~erence was to provide a ~orum within which scientists could report on interesting applications o~ modern decision theory and exchange ideas about controversial issues in the ~oundations o~ the theory o~ choice under un certainty. With that purpose in mind we have selected a mixture of applied and theoretical papers that we hope will appeal to a wide spectrum o~ readers ~rom graduate students in social science departments and business schools to people involved in making hardheaded decisions in business and government. In an introductory article Ole Hagen gives an overview o~ various paradoxes in utility and risk theory and discusses these in the light o~ scientific methodology. He concludes the article by calling ~or joint efforts to provide decision makers with warkable theories. Kenneth Arrow takes up the same issue on a broad basis in his paper where he discusses the implications o~ behavior under uncertainty for policy. In the theoretical papers the reader will ~ind attempts at de~initive Statements of the meaning o~ old concepts and suggestions for the adoption o~ new concepts. For instance, Maurice Allais discusses four di~ferent interpretations o~ the axioms o~ probability and explains the need ~or an empirical characterization o~ the concept of chance.

Download or read book Decision Probability and Utility written by Peter Gärdenfors and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1988-04-29 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decision theory and the theory of rational choice have recently been the subjects of considerable research by philosophers and economists. However, no adequate anthology exists which can be used to introduce students to the field. This volume is designed to meet that need. The essays included are organized into five parts covering the foundations of decision theory, the conceptualization of probability and utility, pholosophical difficulties with the rules of rationality and with the assessment of probability, and causal decision theory. The editors provide an extensive introduction to the field and introductions to each part.

Download or read book ECAI 2012 written by C. Bessiere and published by IOS Press. This book was released on 2012-08-15 with total page 1056 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Artificial intelligence (AI) plays a vital part in the continued development of computer science and informatics. The AI applications employed in fields such as medicine, economics, linguistics, philosophy, psychology and logical analysis, not forgetting industry, are now indispensable for the effective functioning of a multitude of systems. This book presents the papers from the 20th biennial European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, ECAI 2012, held in Montpellier, France, in August 2012. The ECAI conference remains Europe's principal opportunity for researchers and practitioners of Artificial Intelligence to gather and to discuss the latest trends and challenges in all subfields of AI, as well as to demonstrate innovative applications and uses of advanced AI technology. ECAI 2012 featured four keynote speakers, an extensive workshop program, seven invited tutorials and the new Frontiers of Artificial Intelligence track, in which six invited speakers delivered perspective talks on particularly interesting new research results, directions and trends in Artificial Intelligence or in one of its related fields. The proceedings of PAIS 2012 and the System Demonstrations Track are also included in this volume, which will be of interest to all those wishing to keep abreast of the latest developments in the field of AI.

Download or read book Parallel and Distributed Scientific and Engineering Computing written by Yi Pan and published by Nova Publishers. This book was released on 2004 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the not too distant future, every researcher and professional in science and engineering fields will have to understand parallel and distributed computing. With hyperthreading in Intel processors, hypertransport links in AMD processors, multi-core silicon in today's high-end microprocessors from IBM and emerging cluster and grid computing, parallel and distributed computers have moved into the mainstream of computing. To fully exploit these advances in computer architectures, researchers and professionals must start to design parallel or distributed software, systems and algorithms for their scientific and engineering applications. Parallel and distributed scientific and engineering computing has become a key technology which will play an important part in determining, or at least shaping, future research and development activities in many academic and industrial branches. This book reports on the recent important advances in the area of parallel and distributed computing for science and engineering applications. Included in the book are selected papers from prestigious workshops such as PACT-SHPSEC, IPDPS-PDSECA and ICPP-HPSECA together with some invited papers from prominent researchers around the world. The book is basically divided into five main sections. These chapters not only provide novel ideas, new experimental results and handful experience in this field, but also stimulate the future research activities in the area of parallel and distributed computing for science and engineering applications.

Download or read book Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning IDEAL 2002 written by Hujun Yin and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-08-02 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Conference on Intelligent Data Engineering and Automated Learning, IDEAL 2002, held in Manchester, UK in August 2002. The 89 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from more than 150 submissions. The book offers topical sections on data mining, knowledge engineering, text and document processing, internet applications, agent technology, autonomous mining, financial engineering, bioinformatics, learning systems, and pattern recognition.

Download or read book Contributions to Insurance Economics written by Georges Dionne and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-04-17 with total page 536 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a number of years, I have been teaching and doing research in the economics of uncertainty, information, and insurance. Although it is now possible to find textbooks and books of essays on uncertainty and in formation in economics and finance for graduate students and researchers, there is no equivalent material that covers advanced research in insurance. The purpose of this book is to fill this gap in literature. It provides original surveys and essays in the field of insurance economics. The contributions offer basic reference, new material, and teaching supple ments to graduate students and researchers in economics, finance, and insurance. It represents a complement to the book of readings entitled Foundations of Insurance Economics - Readings in Economics and Finance, recently published by the S.S. Huebner Foundation of Insurance Education. In that book, the editors (G. Dionne and S. Harrington) disseminate key papers in the literature and publish an original survey of major contributions in the field.

Download or read book A Utilitarian General Theory of Value written by C.L. Sheng and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2022-07-18 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis of this book is to develop a theory of value covering all kinds of values, based on my unified utilitarian theory. It is unique and is different from all traditional and existing theories of value. Like the views of most psychologists and decision-scientists, value is asserted to be subjective in nature because value exists only for a subject. Value and value judgment are considered statistical in nature in three dimensions, namely in the dimensions of subject, object, and judge. This theory covers a modified von Neumann-Morgenstern utility theory as an integral part. The three conceptions of utility held by philosophers, economicsts, and decision-scientists are unified. The traditional and conventional classification of value into intrinsic and instrumental, which may lead to confusion, misunderstanding, and circularity, is not used. Instead, a classification based on the classification of good things in life according to the principle of exchangeability and replaceability is emphasized and used. A decision-theoretic approach is taken for the study of actions in life. All the actions in a person's life are for the pursuit of values, and all the values pursued are related, directly or indirectly, closely or remotely, to a life plan. Thus, this utilitarian general theory of value eventually leads to a philosophy of life, which is also consequential, teleological, and utilitarian.

Download or read book Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming CP 2003 written by Francesca Rossi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2003-11-18 with total page 1024 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 2003), held in Kinsale, Ireland, from September 29 to October 3, 2003. Detailed information about the CP 2003 conference can be found at the URL http://www.cs.ucc.ie/cp2003/ The CP conferences are held annually and provide an international forum for the latest results on all aspects of constraint programming. Previous CP conferences were held in Cassis (France) in 1995, in Cambridge (USA) in 1996, in Schloss Hagenberg (Austria) in 1997, in Pisa (Italy) in 1998, in Alexandria (USA) in 1999, in Singapore in 2000, in Paphos (Cyprus) in 2001, and in Ithaca (USA) in 2002. Like previous CP conferences, CP 2003 again showed the interdisciplinary nature of computing with constraints, and also its usefulness in many problem domains and applications. Constraint programming, with its solvers, languages, theoretical results, and applications, has become a widely recognized paradigm to model and solve successfully many real-life problems, and to reason about problems in many research areas.

Download or read book Exploring General Equilibrium written by Fischer S. Black and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2010-05-21 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive, unconventional assessment of general equilibrium theory; with a previously unpublished paper. Fischer Black is known for his brilliance as well as his sometimes controversial opinions. Highly respected for his scholarly writings in finance, he now moves into different territory with this incisive, unconventional assessment of general equilibrium theory and what that theory reveals about business cycles, growth, and labor economics. The general equilibrium approach, Black asserts, can be used to explain most of the economy's behavior. It can explain business cycles and growth without using sticky prices, irrationality, economies of scale, or imperfect competition. It can explain the volatility of consumption, output, sales, investment, and inventories with axiomatic utility and constant-returns-to-scale production. It can explain temporary layoffs, job changes with and without intervening unemployment, and the behavior of vacancies. It can explain lower wages in part-time jobs, wages that increase rapidly with time on the job, and the forces that cause migration from poor to rich countries. Although the general equilibrium approach can't be tested in conventional ways, it can be used to generate examples that explain stylized facts—generalized observations from the real world—that have preoccupied macroeconomists for the last decade. Black contrasts his interpretation of these facts with conventional interpretations. Finally, he reviews a substantial body of literature on these topics.

Download or read book Decision Making Process written by Denis Bouyssou and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-05-10 with total page 671 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an overview of the main methods and results in the formal study of the human decision-making process, as defined in a relatively wide sense. A key aim of the approach contained here is to try to break down barriers between various disciplines encompassed by this field, including psychology, economics and computer science. All these approaches have contributed to progress in this very important and much-studied topic in the past, but none have proved sufficient so far to define a complete understanding of the highly complex processes and outcomes. This book provides the reader with state-of-the-art coverage of the field, essentially forming a roadmap to the field of decision analysis. The first part of the book is devoted to basic concepts and techniques for representing and solving decision problems, ranging from operational research to artificial intelligence. Later chapters provide an extensive overview of the decision-making process under conditions of risk and uncertainty. Finally, there are chapters covering various approaches to multi-criteria decision-making. Each chapter is written by experts in the topic concerned, and contains an extensive bibliography for further reading and reference.

Download or read book Global Perspectives on Design Science Research written by Robert Winter and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-05-14 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Global Perspectives on Design Science Research, DERIST 2010, held in St. Gallen, Switzerland, in June 2010. The 35 revised full papers presented together with 10 revised short papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on organising design research, reflecting design science research, design research techniques, design and context, design and organisation, design and information, design research exemplars, design and behaviour, designing collaboration, as well as design and requirements engineering.

Download or read book Distributed Video Sensor Networks written by Bir Bhanu and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-01-04 with total page 476 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Large-scale video networks are of increasing importance in a wide range of applications. However, the development of automated techniques for aggregating and interpreting information from multiple video streams in real-life scenarios is a challenging area of research. Collecting the work of leading researchers from a broad range of disciplines, this timely text/reference offers an in-depth survey of the state of the art in distributed camera networks. The book addresses a broad spectrum of critical issues in this highly interdisciplinary field: current challenges and future directions; video processing and video understanding; simulation, graphics, cognition and video networks; wireless video sensor networks, communications and control; embedded cameras and real-time video analysis; applications of distributed video networks; and educational opportunities and curriculum-development. Topics and features: presents an overview of research in areas of motion analysis, invariants, multiple cameras for detection, object tracking and recognition, and activities in video networks; provides real-world applications of distributed video networks, including force protection, wide area activities, port security, and recognition in night-time environments; describes the challenges in graphics and simulation, covering virtual vision, network security, human activities, cognitive architecture, and displays; examines issues of multimedia networks, registration, control of cameras (in simulations and real networks), localization and bounds on tracking; discusses system aspects of video networks, with chapters on providing testbed environments, data collection on activities, new integrated sensors for airborne sensors, face recognition, and building sentient spaces; investigates educational opportunities and curriculum development from the perspective of computer science and electrical engineering. This unique text will be of great interest to researchers and graduate students of computer vision and pattern recognition, computer graphics and simulation, image processing and embedded systems, and communications, networks and controls. The large number of example applications will also appeal to application engineers.

Download or read book Handbook of Insurance written by Georges Dionne and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 980 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1970's, the research agenda in insurance was dominated by optimal insurance coverage, security design, and equilibrium under conditions of imperfect information. The 1980's saw a growth of theoretical developments including non-expected utility, price volatility, retention capacity, the pricing and design of insurance contracts in the presence of multiple risks, and the liability insurance crisis. The empirical study of information problems, financial derivatives, and large losses due to catastrophic events dominated the research agenda in the 1990's. The Handbook of Insurance provides a single reference source on insurance for professors, researchers, graduate students, regulators, consultants, and practitioners, that reviews the research developments in insurance and its related fields that have occurred over the last thirty years. The book starts with the history and foundations of insurance theory and moves on to review asymmetric information, risk management and insurance pricing, and the industrial organization of insurance markets. The book ends with life insurance, pensions, and economic security. Each chapter has been written by a leading authority in insurance, all contributions have been peer reviewed, and each chapter can be read independently of the others.

Download or read book Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence written by Vicenç Torra and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-10-31 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the proceedings of the 7th InternationalConference on Modeling Decisions for Artificial Intelligence, MDAI 2010,held in Perpignan, France, in October 2010. The 25 papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 43submissions. The volume also contains extended abstracts of the threeinvited papers. The topics covered are aggregation operators anddecision making; clustering and similarity; computational intelligence;and data privacy.

Download or read book Socionics written by Klaus Fischer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2005-12-22 with total page 323 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book includes contributions from an interdisciplinary field of research we call Socionics. Based on a close cooperation between sociologists and researchers from distributed artificial intelligence and multiagent systems, Socionics deals with the exploration of the emergence and dynamics of artificial social systems, agent societies, as well as hybrid man-machine societies. The aim is both to develop intelligent computer technologies by picking up theoretical concepts and methods from sociology and to improve sociological models of societies and organizations by using advanced computer technology. The 15 articles in this state-of-the-art survey combine selected contributions from sociology and informatics on the modeling, construction, and study of complex social systems with special regard to the problem of scaling multiagent systems. The discussion focuses on four specific research areas: multi-layer modeling, organization and self-organization, emergence of social structures, and paths from an agent-centered to a communication-centered perspective in modeling multiagent systems.

Download or read book Radio Resource Management in Multi Tier Cellular Wireless Networks written by Ekram Hossain and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-11-25 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Providing an extensive overview of the radio resource management problem in femtocell networks, this invaluable book considers both code division multiple access femtocells and orthogonal frequency-division multiple access femtocells. In addition to incorporating current research on this topic, the book also covers technical challenges in femtocell deployment, provides readers with a variety of approaches to resource allocation and a comparison of their effectiveness, explains how to model various networks using Stochastic geometry and shot noise theory, and much more.