Download or read book The Construction of Preference written by Sarah Lichtenstein and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-28 with total page 709 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically different responses. These preference reversals violate the principle of procedure invariance that is fundamental to all theories of rational choice. If different elicitation procedures produce different orderings of options, how can preferences be defined and in what sense do they exist? This book shows not only the historical roots of preference construction but also the blossoming of the concept within psychology, law, marketing, philosophy, environmental policy, and economics. Decision making is now understood to be a highly contingent form of information processing, sensitive to task complexity, time pressure, response mode, framing, reference points, and other contextual factors.

Download or read book Elicitation of Preferences written by Baruch Fischhoff and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2000-02-29 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behavior, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behavior. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement. This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the University of California at Berkeley, provides a provocative and constructive engagement between economists and psychologists on the elicitation of preferences.

Download or read book Adaptive Preferences and Women s Empowerment written by Serene J. Khader and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-09-08 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Serene Khader's book on adaptive preference is a book that should be read by anyone interested in oppression and how to struggle against and overcome it. According to many feminist theories of oppression, a primary problem for overcoming oppression is that the victims become accustomed to their circumstances and even come to prefer them. Their preference for their oppressive conditions then form practical and moral obstacles to changing them, since the oppressed act in ways to further those conditions and it seems cruel or unfair to take from the oppressed what they claim to prefer. Such preferences are called adaptive preferences, and transforming them seems to be an important goal of institutions that aim to improve the lives of the oppressed. This book is about how and why public institutions should intervene in the lives and societies of oppressed persons with adaptive preferences to encourage their flourishing. Although Khader explicitly targets impoverished and oppressed women in the global South, her arguments should apply equally to other contexts of oppression and deprivation.

Download or read book Preference Change written by Till Grüne-Yanoff and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-06-11 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing preferencesis a phenomenonoften invoked but rarely properlyaccounted for. Throughout the history of the social sciences, researchers have come against the possibility that their subjects’ preferenceswere affected by the phenomenato be explainedor by otherfactorsnot taken into accountin the explanation.Sporadically, attempts have been made to systematically investigate these in uences, but none of these seems to have had a lasting impact. Today we are still not much further with respect to preference change than we were at the middle of the last century. This anthology hopes to provide a new impulse for research into this important subject. In particular, we have chosen two routes to amplify this impulse. First, we stress the use of modellingtechniquesfamiliar from economicsand decision theory. Instead of constructing complex, all-encompassing theories of preference change, the authors of this volume start with very simple, formal accounts of some possible and hopefully plausible mechanism of preference change. Eventually, these models may nd their way into larger, empirically adequate theories, but at this stage, we think that the most importantwork lies in building structure.Secondly,we stress the importance of interdisciplinary exchange. Only by drawing together experts from different elds can the complex empirical and theoretical issues in the modelling of preference change be adequately investigated.

Download or read book Working with Preferences Less Is More written by Souhila Kaci and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-06-20 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preferences are useful in many real-life problems, guiding human decision making from early childhood up to complex professional and organizational decisions. In artificial intelligence specifically, preferences is a relatively new topic of relevance to nonmonotonic reasoning, multiagent systems, constraint satisfaction, decision making, social choice theory and decision-theoretic planning The first part of this book deals with preference representation, with specific chapters dedicated to representation languages, nonmonotonic logics of preferences, conditional preference networks, positive and negative preferences, and the study of preferences in cognitive psychology. The second part of the book deals with reasoning with preferences, and includes chapters dedicated to preference-based argumentation, preferences database queries, and rank-ordering outcomes and intervals. The author concludes by examining forthcoming research perspectives. This is inherently a multidisciplinary topic and this book will be of interest to computer scientists, economists, operations researchers, mathematicians, logicians, philosophers and psychologists.

Download or read book Preference Belief and Similarity written by Amos Tversky and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-11-21 with total page 1046 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Amos Tversky (1937–1996), a towering figure in cognitive and mathematical psychology, devoted his professional life to the study of similarity, judgment, and decision making. He had a unique ability to master the technicalities of normative ideals and then to intuit and demonstrate experimentally their systematic violation due to the vagaries and consequences of human information processing. He created new areas of study and helped transform disciplines as varied as economics, law, medicine, political science, philosophy, and statistics. This book collects forty of Tversky's articles, selected by him in collaboration with the editor during the last months of Tversky's life. It is divided into three sections: Similarity, Judgment, and Preferences. The Preferences section is subdivided into Probabilistic Models of Choice, Choice under Risk and Uncertainty, and Contingent Preferences. Included are several articles written with his frequent collaborator, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman.

Download or read book Neuroscience of Preference and Choice written by Raymond J. Dolan and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2012 with total page 357 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the most pressing questions in neuroscience, psychology and economics today is how does the brain generate preferences and make choices? With a unique interdisciplinary approach, this volume is among the first to explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating the generation of the preferences that guide choice. From preferences determining mundane purchases, to social preferences influencing mating choice, through to moral decisions, the authors adopt diverse approaches to answer the question. Chapters explore the instability of preferences and the common neural processes that occur across preferences. Edited by one of the world's most renowned cognitive neuroscientists, each chapter is authored by an expert in the field, with a host of international contributors. Emphasis on common process underlying preference generation makes material applicable to a variety of disciplines - neuroscience, psychology, economics, law, philosophy, etc. Offers specific focus on how preferences are generated to guide decision making, carefully examining one aspect of the broad field of neuroeconomics and complementing existing volumes Features outstanding, international scholarship, with chapters written by an expert in the topic area

Download or read book Preference Learning written by Johannes Fürnkranz and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-11-19 with total page 457 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The topic of preferences is a new branch of machine learning and data mining, and it has attracted considerable attention in artificial intelligence research in previous years. It involves learning from observations that reveal information about the preferences of an individual or a class of individuals. Representing and processing knowledge in terms of preferences is appealing as it allows one to specify desires in a declarative way, to combine qualitative and quantitative modes of reasoning, and to deal with inconsistencies and exceptions in a flexible manner. And, generalizing beyond training data, models thus learned may be used for preference prediction. This is the first book dedicated to this topic, and the treatment is comprehensive. The editors first offer a thorough introduction, including a systematic categorization according to learning task and learning technique, along with a unified notation. The first half of the book is organized into parts on label ranking, instance ranking, and object ranking; while the second half is organized into parts on applications of preference learning in multiattribute domains, information retrieval, and recommender systems. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence, in particular machine learning and data mining, and in fields such as multicriteria decision-making and operations research.

Download or read book Reasoning about Preference Dynamics written by Fenrong Liu and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2011-05-30 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our preferences determine how we act and think, but exactly what the mechanics are and how they work is a central cause of concern in many disciplines. This book uses techniques from modern logics of information flow and action to develop a unified new theory of what preference is and how it changes. The theory emphasizes reasons for preference, as well as its entanglement with our beliefs. Moreover, the book provides dynamic logical systems which describe the explicit triggers driving preference change, including new information, suggestions, and commands. In sum, the book creates new bridges between many fields, from philosophy and computer science to economics, linguistics, and psychology. For the experienced scholar access to a large body of recent literature is provided and the novice gets a thorough introduction to the action and techniques of dynamic logic.

Download or read book Exotic Preferences written by George Loewenstein and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-08-02 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Loewenstein is one of the pioneers of the rapidly growing field of behavioral economics. For over twenty years he has been working at the intersection of economics and psychology and is one of the few people of whom it can be said that their work is equally respected and well known within both disciplines. This book brings together a selection of his papers focusing on what he calls "exotic preferences"— the disparate motives that drive human behavior. In addition to covering the history and methodology of behavioral economics, they also touch on a wide range of fascinating topics such as the motives that drive extreme athletes, our propensity to want to get unpleasant experiences out of the way so we can focus on the more pleasant, and the psychology of curiosity. There are also papers on social preferences, discussing the importance of perceptions of fairness in interpersonal interactions, intertemporal choice— the tradeoffs between costs and benefits occurring at different points in time— and the impact of emotion on economic decision making. An original introduction outlines Loewenstein's general approach to research, and there are short introductions to each paper outlining briefly when, how and why they came to be written, providing a fascinating and vivid insight into the process of intellectual creativity.

Download or read book Choice Preferences and Procedures written by Kotaro Suzumura and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 806 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kotaro Suzumura is one of the world’s foremost thinkers in social choice theory and welfare economics. Bringing together essays that have become classics in the field, Choice, Preferences, and Procedures examines foundational issues of normative economics and collective decision making. Social choice theory seeks to critically assess and rationally design economic mechanisms for improving human life. An important part of Suzumura’s contribution over the past forty years has entailed fusion of abstract microeconomic ideas with an understanding of real-world economies in a coherent analysis. This volume of selected essays reveals the evolution of Suzumura’s thinking over his career. Groundbreaking papers explore the nature of individual and social choice and the idea of assigning value to freedom of choice, different forms of rationality, and concepts of individual rights, equity, and fairness. Suzumura elucidates his innovative approach for recognizing interpersonal comparisons in the vein of Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy and expounds the effect of paying due attention to nonconsequential features, such as the opportunity to choose and the procedure for decision making, along with the standard consequential features. Analyzing the role of economic competition, Suzumura points out how restricting competition may, in some circumstances, improve social welfare. This is not to recommend government regulation rather than market competition but to emphasize the importance of procedural features in a competitive context. He concludes with illuminating essays on the history of economic thought, focusing on the ideas of Vilfredo Pareto, Arthur Pigou, John Hicks, and Paul Samuelson.

Download or read book A Short Introduction to Preferences written by Francesca Bellet and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 90 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computational social choice is an expanding field that merges classical topics like economics and voting theory with more modern topics like artificial intelligence, multiagent systems, and computational complexity. This book provides a concise introduction to the main research lines in this field, covering aspects such as preference modelling, uncertainty reasoning, social choice, stable matching, and computational aspects of preference aggregation and manipulation. The book is centered around the notion of preference reasoning, both in the single-agent and the multi-agent setting. It presents the main approaches to modeling and reasoning with preferences, with particular attention to two popular and powerful formalisms, soft constraints and CP-nets. The authors consider preference elicitation and various forms of uncertainty in soft constraints. They review the most relevant results in voting, with special attention to computational social choice. Finally, the book considers preferences in matching problems. The book is intended for students and researchers who may be interested in an introduction to preference reasoning and multi-agent preference aggregation, and who want to know the basic notions and results in computational social choice. Table of Contents: Introduction / Preference Modeling and Reasoning / Uncertainty in Preference Reasoning / Aggregating Preferences / Stable Marriage Problems

Download or read book Preferences and Decisions written by Salvatore Greco and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-10-05 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 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 Private Truths Public Lies written by Timur Kuran and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-16 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Preference falsification, according to the economist Timur Kuran, is the act of misrepresenting one's wants under perceived social pressures. It happens frequently in everyday life, such as when we tell the host of a dinner party that we are enjoying the food when we actually find it bland. In Private Truths, Public Lies Kuran argues convincingly that the phenomenon not only is ubiquitous but has huge social and political consequences. Drawing on diverse intellectual traditions, including those rooted in economics, psychology, sociology, and political science, Kuran provides a unified theory of how preference falsification shapes collective decisions, orients structural change, sustains social stability, distorts human knowledge, and conceals political possibilities. A common effect of preference falsification is the preservation of widely disliked structures. Another is the conferment of an aura of stability on structures vulnerable to sudden collapse. When the support of a policy, tradition, or regime is largely contrived, a minor event may activate a bandwagon that generates massive yet unanticipated change. In distorting public opinion, preference falsification also corrupts public discourse and, hence, human knowledge. So structures held in place by preference falsification may, if the condition lasts long enough, achieve increasingly genuine acceptance. The book demonstrates how human knowledge and social structures co-evolve in complex and imperfectly predictable ways, without any guarantee of social efficiency. Private Truths, Public Lies uses its theoretical argument to illuminate an array of puzzling social phenomena. They include the unexpected fall of communism, the paucity, until recently, of open opposition to affirmative action in the United States, and the durability of the beliefs that have sustained India's caste system.

Download or read book Algorithmics of Matching Under Preferences written by David F. Manlove and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2013 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Matching problems with preferences are all around us OCo they arise when agents seek to be allocated to one another on the basis of ranked preferences over potential outcomes. Efficient algorithms are needed for producing matchings that optimise the satisfaction of the agents according to their preference lists.In recent years there has been a sharp increase in the study of algorithmic aspects of matching problems with preferences, partly reflecting the growing number of applications of these problems worldwide. This book describes the most important results in this area, providing a timely update to The Stable Marriage Problem: Structure and Algorithms (D Gusfield and R W Irving, MIT Press, 1989) in connection with stable matching problems, whilst also broadening the scope to include matching problems with preferences under a range of alternative optimality criteria."

Download or read book Food Preferences and Taste written by Helen Macbeth and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1997-11-01 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Food preferences and tastes are among the fundamentals affecting human existence; the sociocultural, physiological and neurological factors involved have therefore been widely researched and are well documented. However, information and debate on these factors are scattered across the academic literature of different disciplines. In this volume cross-disciplinary perspectives are brought together by an international team of contributors that includes socialand biological anthropologists, ethologists and ethnologists, psychologists, neurologists and zoologists in order to provide access to the different specialisms on the topic.