Download or read book Rational Choice in an Uncertain World written by Reid Hastie and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2010 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Second Edition of Rational Choice in an Uncertain World the authors compare the basic principles of rationality with actual behaviour in making decisions. They describe theories and research findings from the field of judgment and decision making in a non-technical manner, using anecdotes as a teaching device. Intended as an introductory textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, the material not only is of scholarly interest but is practical as well. The Second Edition includes: - more coverage on the role of emotions, happiness, and general well-being in decisions - a summary of the new research on the neuroscience of decision processes - more discussion of the adaptive value of (non-rational heuristics) - expansion of the graphics for decision trees, probability trees, and Venn diagrams.
Download or read book Public Policy in an Uncertain World written by Charles F. Manski and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Manski argues that public policy is based on untrustworthy analysis. Failing to account for uncertainty in an uncertain world, policy analysis routinely misleads policy makers with expressions of certitude. Manski critiques the status quo and offers an innovation to improve both how policy research is conducted and how it is used by policy makers.
Download or read book Risk Choice and Uncertainty written by George G. Szpiro and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its core, economics is about making decisions. In the history of economic thought, great intellectual prowess has been exerted toward devising exquisite theories of optimal decision making in situations of constraint, risk, and scarcity. Yet not all of our choices are purely logical, and so there is a longstanding tension between those emphasizing the rational and irrational sides of human behavior. One strand develops formal models of rational utility maximizing while the other draws on what behavioral science has shown about our tendency to act irrationally. In Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty, George G. Szpiro offers a new narrative of the three-century history of the study of decision making, tracing how crucial ideas have evolved and telling the stories of the thinkers who shaped the field. Szpiro examines economics from the early days of theories spun from anecdotal evidence to the rise of a discipline built around elegant mathematics through the past half century’s interest in describing how people actually behave. Considering the work of Locke, Bentham, Jevons, Walras, Friedman, Tversky and Kahneman, Thaler, and a range of other thinkers, he sheds light on the vast scope of discovery since Bernoulli first proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox. Presenting fundamental mathematical theories in easy-to-understand language, Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty is a revelatory history for readers seeking to grasp the grand sweep of economic thought.
Download or read book Pathologies of Rational Choice Theory written by Donald Green and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 1994-09-28 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first comprehensive critical evaluation of the use of rational choice theory in political science. Writing in an accessible and nontechnical style, Donald P. Green and Ian Shapiro assess rational choice theory where it is reputed to be most successful: the study of collective action, the behavior of political parties and politicians, and such phenomena as voting cycles and Prisoner's Dilemmas. In their hard-hitting critique, Green and Shapiro demonstrate that the much heralded achievements of rational choice theory are in fact deeply suspect and that fundamental rethinking is needed if rational choice theorists are to contribute to the understanding of politics. In their final chapters, they anticipate and respond to a variety of possible rational choice responses to their arguments, thereby initiating a dialogue that is bound to continue for some time.
Download or read book Acting in an Uncertain World written by Michel Callon and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2011-01-21 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A call for a new form of democracy in which “hybrid forums” composed of experts and laypeople address such sociotechnical controversies as hazardous waste, genetically modified organisms, and nanotechnology. Controversies over such issues as nuclear waste, genetically modified organisms, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, avian flu, and cell phone towers arise almost daily as rapid scientific and technological advances create uncertainty and bring about unforeseen concerns. The authors of Acting in an Uncertain World argue that political institutions must be expanded and improved to manage these controversies, to transform them into productive conversations, and to bring about “technical democracy.” They show how “hybrid forums”—in which experts, non-experts, ordinary citizens, and politicians come together—reveal the limits of traditional delegative democracies, in which decisions are made by quasi-professional politicians and techno-scientific information is the domain of specialists in laboratories. The division between professionals and laypeople, the authors claim, is simply outmoded. The authors argue that laboratory research should be complemented by everyday experimentation pursued in the real world, and they describe various modes of cooperation between the two. They explore a range of concrete examples of hybrid forums that have dealt with sociotechnical controversies including nuclear waste disposal in France, industrial waste and birth defects in Japan, a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts, and mad cow disease in the United Kingdom. The authors discuss the implications for political decision making in general and describe a “dialogic” democracy that enriches traditional representative democracy. To invent new procedures for consultation and representation, they suggest, is to contribute to an endless process that is necessary for the ongoing democratization of democracy.
Download or read book Theory of Decision Under Uncertainty written by Itzhak Gilboa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the classical axiomatic theories of decision under uncertainty, as well as critiques thereof and alternative theories. It focuses on the meaning of probability, discussing some definitions and surveying their scope of applicability. The behavioral definition of subjective probability serves as a way to present the classical theories, culminating in Savage's theorem. The limitations of this result as a definition of probability lead to two directions - first, similar behavioral definitions of more general theories, such as non-additive probabilities and multiple priors, and second, cognitive derivations based on case-based techniques.
Download or read book Rationality written by Steven Pinker and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-09-28 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 'Punchy, funny and invigorating ... Pinker is the high priest of rationalism' Sunday Times 'If you've ever considered taking drugs to make yourself smarter, read Rationality instead. It's cheaper, more entertaining, and more effective' Jonathan Haidt, author of The Righteous Mind In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorizing? In Rationality, Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species - cavemen out of time fatally cursed with biases, fallacies and illusions. After all, we discovered the laws of nature, lengthened and enriched our lives and set the benchmarks for rationality itself. Instead, he explains, we think in ways that suit the low-tech contexts in which we spend most of our lives, but fail to take advantage of the powerful tools of reasoning we have built up over millennia: logic, critical thinking, probability, causal inference, and decision-making under uncertainty. These tools are not a standard part of our educational curricula, and have never been presented clearly and entertainingly in a single book - until now. Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight and humour, Rationality will enlighten, inspire and empower. 'A terrific book, much-needed for our time' Peter Singer
Download or read book The New Rational Manager written by Charles H. Kepner and published by . This book was released on 1981 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insight into the art of managing people, information and capital resources from two highly respected management consultants.
Download or read book Thinking and Deciding written by Jonathan Baron and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-22 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with its first edition and through subsequent editions, Thinking and Deciding has established itself as the required text and important reference work for students and scholars of human cognition and rationality. In this fourth edition, first published in 2007, Jonathan Baron retains the comprehensive attention to the key questions addressed in the previous editions - how should we think? What, if anything, keeps us from thinking that way? How can we improve our thinking and decision making? - and his expanded treatment of topics such as risk, utilitarianism, Baye's theorem, and moral thinking. With the student in mind, the fourth edition emphasises the development of an understanding of the fundamental concepts in judgement and decision making. This book is essential reading for students and scholars in judgement and decision making and related fields, including psychology, economics, law, medicine, and business.
Download or read book Advances in Decision Making Under Risk and Uncertainty written by Mohammed Abdellaoui and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether we like it or not we all feel that the world is uncertain. From choosing a new technology to selecting a job, we rarely know in advance what outcome will result from our decisions. Unfortunately, the standard theory of choice under uncertainty developed in the early forties and fifties turns out to be too rigid to take many tricky issues of choice under uncertainty into account. The good news is that we have now moved away from the early descriptively inadequate modeling of behavior. This book brings the reader into contact with the accomplished progress in individual decision making through the most recent contributions to uncertainty modeling and behavioral decision making. It also introduces the reader into the many subtle issues to be resolved for rational choice under uncertainty.
Download or read book Disorder Under Heaven written by James Tong and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1992-02-01 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A monumental study of collective violence in the premodern world, this book analyzes all instances of rebellion and banditry recorded in 1,097 countries in China during the 277 years of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). The assembled evidence constitutes the largest annual, county-level time-series on collective violence events in any part of the world, and the 630 recorded cases are used to test the major social science theories on the origins of collective violence. Using systematic data collected from local gazetteers on natural calamities, size of harvests, famine relief, physical terrain, local construction, and troop deployment, the author advances and validates a rational-choice argument that violence increased when survival in a subsistence economy became uncertain and the likelihood of punishment was low. Analyzing the administrative effectiveness and coercive capacity of the Ming state, the author also finds evidence to support a complementary structuralist explanation for increased collective violence in times of lax rulers, state insolvency, and inadequate welfare and tax policies. After an introductory chapter, the author explicates the main theoretical and methodological issues of collective violence and sketches the empirical pattern of rebellions and banditry, differentiating them by the level of threat they posed to the regime and by the sociopolitical profile of participating groups. In the next four chapters, he relates the Ming empirical configuration to four theoretical frameworks for collective violence: rational choice,which includes the issue of motive and choice—why people chose to become bandits; opportunity, in which the level of Ming collective violence is treated to variations in a regime's coercive capacity; social change, which is used to shed light on food riots, anti-tax rebellions, and conflict between employers and employees and between natives and outsiders; and class conflict, which prompts the author to assess the Marxist explanation for collective violence by investigating revolts of commoners against imperial clansmen, bondservants against masters, and tenants against landlords. The final chapter presents how the author's conclusions on why and how people became outlaws in the Ming and points the questions for future research.
Download or read book Handbook of Behavioural Economics and Smart Decision Making written by Morris Altman and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2017-05-26 with total page 607 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Handbook is a unique and original contribution of over thirty chapters on behavioural economics, examining and addressing an important stream of research where the starting assumption is that decision-makers are for the most part relatively smart or rational. This particular approach is in contrast to a theme running through much contemporary work where individuals’ behaviour is deemed irrational, biased, and error-prone, often due to how people are hardwired. In the smart people approach, where errors or biases occur and when social dilemmas arise, more often than not, improving the decision-making environment can repair these problems without hijacking or manipulating the preferences of decision-makers. This book covers a wide-range of themes from micro to macro, including various sub-disciplines within economics such as economic psychology, heuristics, fast and slow-thinking, neuroeconomics, experiments, the capabilities approach, institutional economics, methodology, nudging, ethics, and public policy.
Download or read book Uncertain Belief written by David J. Bartholomew and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 1996-03-14 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The certainties which once underpinned Christian belief have crumbled in a world where science sets the standard for what is true. A rational case for belief must therefore be constructed out of uncertainties. Probability theory provides the tools for measuring and combining uncertainties and is thus the key to progress. This book examines four much debated topics where the logic of uncertain inference can be brought to bear. These are: miracles, the paranormal, God's existence, and the Bible. Given the great diversity of evidence, it is not surprising that opposite conclusions have been drawn by supposedly rational people. An assessment of the state of argument from a probabilistic perspective is overdue. In this book Professor Bartholomew examines and refutes some of the more extravagent claims, evaluates the weight of some of the quantitive evidence, and provides an answer to the fundamental question: is it rational to be a Christian?
Download or read book Bounded Rationality written by Gerd Gigerenzer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002-07-26 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a complex and uncertain world, humans and animals make decisions under the constraints of limited knowledge, resources, and time. Yet models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields largely ignore these real constraints and instead assume agents with perfect information and unlimited time. About forty years ago, Herbert Simon challenged this view with his notion of "bounded rationality." Today, bounded rationality has become a fashionable term used for disparate views of reasoning. This book promotes bounded rationality as the key to understanding how real people make decisions. Using the concept of an "adaptive toolbox," a repertoire of fast and frugal rules for decision making under uncertainty, it attempts to impose more order and coherence on the idea of bounded rationality. The contributors view bounded rationality neither as optimization under constraints nor as the study of people's reasoning fallacies. The strategies in the adaptive toolbox dispense with optimization and, for the most part, with calculations of probabilities and utilities. The book extends the concept of bounded rationality from cognitive tools to emotions; it analyzes social norms, imitation, and other cultural tools as rational strategies; and it shows how smart heuristics can exploit the structure of environments.
Download or read book How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind written by Paul Erickson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.
Download or read book The SAGE Handbook of Social Science Methodology written by William Outhwaite and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2007-10-18 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "An excellent guidebook through different approaches to social science measurement, including the all-important route-maps that show us how to get there." - Roger Jowell, City University "In this wide-ranging collection of chapters, written by acknowledged experts in their fields, Outhwaite and Turner have brought together material in one volume which will provide an extremely important platform for consideration of the full range of contemporary analytical and methodological issues." - Charles Crothers, Auckland University of Technology This is a jewel among methods Handbooks, bringing together a formidable collection of international contributors to comment on every aspect of the various central issues, complications and controversies in the core methodological traditions. It is designed to meet the needs of those disciplinary and nondisciplinary problem-oriented social inquirers for a comprehensive overview of the methodological literature. The text is divided into 7 sections: Overviews of methodological approaches in the social sciences Cases, comparisons and theory Quantification and experiment Rationality, complexity and collectivity Interpretation, critique and postmodernity Discourse construction Engagement. Edited by two leading figures in the field, the Handbook is a landmark work in the field of research methods. More than just a ′cookbook′ that teaches readers how to master techniques, it will give social scientists in all disciplines an appreciation for the full range of methodological debates today, from the quantitative to the qualitative, giving them deeper and sharpen insights into their own research questions. It will generate debate, solutions and a series of questions for researchers to exploit and develop in their research and teaching.
Download or read book House of Cards written by Robyn Dawes and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-24 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robin Dawes spares no one in this powerful critique of modern psychotherapeutic practice. As Dawes points out, we have all been swayed by the "pop psych" view of the world--believing, for example, that self-esteem is an essential precursor to being a productive human being, that events in one's childhood affect one's fate as an adult, and that "you have to love yourself before you can love another."
