Download or read book Rational Choice Using Imprecise Probabilities and Utilities written by Paul Weirich and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-02-25 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An agent often does not have precise probabilities or utilities to guide resolution of a decision problem. I advance a principle of rationality for making decisions in such cases. To begin, I represent the doxastic and conative state of an agent with a set of pairs of a probability assignment and a utility assignment. Then I support a decision principle that allows any act that maximizes expected utility according to some pair of assignments in the set. Assuming that computation of an option's expected utility uses comprehensive possible outcomes that include the option's risk, no consideration supports a stricter requirement.
Download or read book Decision Probability and Utility written by Peter Gärdenfors and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 449 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 Taking Chances written by Jordan Howard Sobel and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1994-04-29 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: J. Howard Sobel has long been recognized as an important figure in philosophical discussions of rational decision. He has done much to help formulate the concept of causal decision theory. In this volume of essays Sobel explores the Bayesian idea that rational actions maximize expected values, where an action's expected value is a weighted average of its agent's values for its possible total outcomes. Newcomb's Problem and The Prisoner's Dilemma are discussed, and Allais-type puzzles are viewed from the perspective of causal world Bayesianism. The author establishes principles for distinguishing options in decision problems, and studies ways in which perfectly rational causal maximizers can be capable of resolute choices. Sobel also views critically Gauthier's revisionist ideas about maximizing rationality. This collection will be a desideratum for anyone working in the field of rational choice theory, whether in philosophy, economics, political science, psychology or statistics. Howard Sobel's work in decision theory is certainly among the most important, interesting and challenging that is being done by philosophers.
Download or read book Commitment and Resoluteness in Rational Choice written by Chrisoula Andreou and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-03 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing and building on the existing literature, this Element explores the interesting and challenging philosophical terrain where issues regarding cooperation, commitment, and control intersect. Section 1 discusses interpersonal and intrapersonal Prisoner's Dilemma situations, and the possibility of a set of unrestrained choices adding up in a way that is problematic relative to the concerns of the choosers involved. Section 2 focuses on the role of precommitment devices in rational choice. Section 3 considers the role of resoluteness in rational choice and action. And Section 4 delves into some related complications concerning the nature of actions and the nature of intentions.
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 Realistic Decision Theory written by Paul Weirich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2004-09-16 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within traditional decision theory, common decision principles -- e.g. the principle to maximize utility -- generally invoke idealization; they govern ideal agents in ideal circumstances. In Realistic Decision Theory, Paul Weirch adds practicality to decision theory by formulating principles applying to nonideal agents in nonideal circumstances, such as real people coping with complex decisions. Bridging the gap between normative demands and psychological resources, Realistic Decision Theory is essential reading for theorists seeking precise normative decision principles that acknowledge the limits and difficulties of human decision-making.
Download or read book Phylogenetic Trees and Molecular Evolution written by David R. Bickel and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-09-29 with total page 112 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book serves as a brief introduction to phylogenetic trees and molecular evolution for biologists and biology students. It does so by presenting the main concepts in a variety of ways: first visually, then in a history, next in a dice game, and finally in simple equations. The content is primarily designed to introduce upper-level undergraduate and graduate students of biology to phylogenetic tree reconstruction and the underlying models of molecular evolution. A unique feature also of interest to experienced researchers is the emphasis on simple ways to quantify the uncertainty in the results more fully than is possible with standard methods.
Download or read book Preference Change written by David Strohmaier and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-01-31 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For most of its history, decision theory has investigated the rational choices of humans under the assumption of static preferences. Human preferences, however, change. In recent years, decision theory has increasingly acknowledged the reality of preference change throughout life. This Element provides an accessible introduction and new contributions to the debates on preference change. It is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, the authors discuss what preference change is and whether we can integrate it into decision theory. In the second chapter, they present models of preference change, including a novel proposal of their own. In the third and final chapter, they discuss how we can rationally choose a course of action when our preferences might change. Both the transformative experience literature and recent work on choosing for changing selves are discussed.
Download or read book Rational Responses to Risks written by Paul Weirich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-07-10 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Good decisions account for risks. For example, the risk of an accident while driving in the rain makes a reasonable driver decide to slow down. While risk is a large topic in theoretical disciplines such as economics and psychology, as well as in practical disciplines such as medicine and finance, philosophy has a unique contribution to make in developing a normative theory of risk that states what risk is, and to what extent our responses to it are rational. Weirich here develops a philosophical theory of the rationality of responses to risk. He first distinguishes two types of risk: first, a chance of a bad event, and second, an act's risk in relation to its possible outcomes. He argues that this distinction has normative significance in the sense that one's attitudes towards these types of risks - and how one acts on them - are governed by different general principles of rationality. Consequently, a comprehensive account of risk must not only characterize rational responses to risk but also explain why these responses are rational. Weirich explains how, for a rational ideal agent, the expected utilities of the acts available in a decision problem explain the agent's preferences among the acts. As a result, maximizing expected utility is just following preferences among the acts. His view takes an act's expected utility, not just as a feature of a representation of preferences among acts, but also as a factor in the explanation of preferences among acts. The book's precise formulation of general standards of rationality for attitudes and for acts, and its rigorous argumentation for these standards, make it philosophical; but while mainly of interest to philosophers, its broader arguments will contribute to the conceptual foundations of studies of risk in all disciplines that study it.
Download or read book Money Pump Arguments written by Johan E. Gustafsson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-13 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suppose that you prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A. Your preferences violate Expected Utility Theory by being cyclic. Money-pump arguments offer a way to show that such violations are irrational. Suppose that you start with A. Then you should be willing to trade A for C and then C for B. But then, once you have B, you are offered a trade back to A for a small cost. Since you prefer A to B, you pay the small sum to trade from B to A. But now you have been turned into a money pump. You are back to the alternative you started with but with less money. This Element shows how each of the axioms of Expected Utility Theory can be defended by money-pump arguments of this kind. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Download or read book Political Party Financing and Electoral Politics in Nigeria s Fourth Republic written by Babayo Sule and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-03-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Political Party Financing and Electoral Politics in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, Babayo Sule provides a detailed analysis of the process of political party financing in Nigeria from 1999 to the present. Sule links the party financing process with the electoral process and explores issues of democratic accountability, transparency, and corruption in Nigeria under democratic rule. Issues of excessive spending, violation of legal procedures for party financing and monitoring of parties’ activities, particularly, finances are explored. The book presents an analytical discourse on elections and processes that influence an election in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic in which party financing and money politics are instrumental. This book observes how political corruption gains root in the process of party financing and builds a theory linking party financing, electoral politics, and democratic accountability. This book provides practical policy implications for strengthening Nigeria’s electoral process and transparency in its democracy.
Download or read book A Plea for Plausibility written by John R. Welch and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-03-17 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book develops an original theory of decision-making based on the concept of plausibility. The author advocates plausible reasoning as a general philosophical method and demonstrates how it can be applied to problems in argumentation theory, scientific theory choice, risk management, ethics, law, economics, and epistemology. Human decisions are conditioned by formidable uncertainty. The standard resource for dealing rationally with uncertainty is the mathematical concept of probability. The probability calculus is well-known, but since the numerical demands for applying it cannot usually be met, it is not widely applicable. By contrast, the concept of plausibility is widely applicable, but it is little known. This book relies on a generalized concept of plausibility whose strength is its adaptability. The adaptability is due to a novel form of decision theory that takes plausibilities as inputs. This form of decision theory remains applicable to decisions informed by sharp probabilities and utilities, but it can also be applied to decisions that must be made without them. It can aid in the rationally critical enterprise of discriminating good arguments from bad, and this can foster philosophical progress. A Plea for Plausibility will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in argumentation theory, philosophy of science, ethics, epistemology, economics, law, and risk management.
Download or read book Foundations of Rational Choice Under Risk written by Paul Anand and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Describes and evaluates a number of existing criticisms of the formal theory of rationality and subjective expected utility theory. The author argues that rationality is not a behavioural entity, but rather has to do with the relation between an agent's preferences and his or her behaviour.
Download or read book Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge Based Systems Applications written by Jesús Medina and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-05-29 with total page 773 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This three volume set (CCIS 853-855) constitutes the proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, IPMU 2017, held in Cádiz, Spain, in June 2018. The 193 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 383 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on advances on explainable artificial intelligence; aggregation operators, fuzzy metrics and applications; belief function theory and its applications; current techniques to model, process and describe time series; discrete models and computational intelligence; formal concept analysis and uncertainty; fuzzy implication functions; fuzzy logic and artificial intelligence problems; fuzzy mathematical analysis and applications; fuzzy methods in data mining and knowledge discovery; fuzzy transforms: theory and applications to data analysis and image processing; imprecise probabilities: foundations and applications; mathematical fuzzy logic, mathematical morphology; measures of comparison and entropies for fuzzy sets and their extensions; new trends in data aggregation; pre-aggregation functions and generalized forms of monotonicity; rough and fuzzy similarity modelling tools; soft computing for decision making in uncertainty; soft computing in information retrieval and sentiment analysis; tri-partitions and uncertainty; decision making modeling and applications; logical methods in mining knowledge from big data; metaheuristics and machine learning; optimization models for modern analytics; uncertainty in medicine; uncertainty in Video/Image Processing (UVIP).
Download or read book Beyond Uncertainty written by Katie Steele and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The main aim of this Element is to introduce the topic of limited awareness, and changes in awareness, to those interested in the philosophy of decision-making and uncertain reasoning. While it has long been of interest to economists and computer scientists, this topic has only recently been subject to philosophical investigation. Indeed, at first sight limited awareness seems to evade any systematic treatment: it is beyond the uncertainty that can be managed. On the one hand, an agent has no control over what contingencies she is and is not aware of at a given time, and any awareness growth takes her by surprise. On the other hand, agents apparently learn to identify the situations in which they are more and less likely to experience limited awareness and subsequent awareness growth. How can these two sides be reconciled? That is the puzzle we confront in this Element.
Download or read book Strengthening Links Between Data Analysis and Soft Computing written by Przemyslaw Grzegorzewski and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-09-10 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book gathers contributions presented at the 7th International Conference on Soft Methods in Probability and Statistics SMPS 2014, held in Warsaw (Poland) on September 22-24, 2014. Its aim is to present recent results illustrating new trends in intelligent data analysis. It gives a comprehensive overview of current research into the fusion of soft computing methods with probability and statistics. Synergies of both fields might improve intelligent data analysis methods in terms of robustness to noise and applicability to larger datasets, while being able to efficiently obtain understandable solutions of real-world problems.
Download or read book Rational Choice and Expected Utility written by Reed Brannon Richter and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
