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 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 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how decision-makers can manage uncertainty that varies in both kind and severity by extending and supplementing Bayesian decision theory.
Download or read book Political Philosophy written by Mario Bunge and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-12 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political philosophy is not a well-defined field. It hovers between political theory and classical philosophy. Few early political thinkers could have anticipated the most pressing political issues of our time: the need to stop global warming; the reduction of nuclear armaments; the rise of inequality between individuals and nations; and the struggle against authoritarianism, particularly when it comes disguised as democracy or as socialism. Here, celebrated philosopher Mario Bunge masterfully integrates socio-political theory into a philosophical exploration of power and resource distribution in the world today. Bunge contends that even recent political thinkers have generally failed to address the political underpinnings of topical issues. Environmental degradation, gender and race discriminations, participative democracy, nationalism, imperialism, the North-South divide, resource wars, and the industrial-military complex have all largely been bypassed in political thinking. Even connections between poverty and environmental degradation, and between inequality and bad health, have escaped the attention of those who would call themselves political thinkers. Bunge believes that political philosophers should pay more attention to social indicators, such as the standard index of income inequality and the United Nations human development index. It is pointless to write about redistributive policies unless we have a shared understanding of current wealth distribution. This is, in short, a modern treatise on sociopolitical concerns.
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 Encyclopedia of Human Behavior written by and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2012-01-31 with total page 2475 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Human Behavior, Second Edition, Three Voluime Set is an award-winning three-volume reference on human action and reaction, and the thoughts, feelings, and physiological functions behind those actions. Presented alphabetically by title, 300 articles probe both enduring and exciting new topics in physiological psychology, perception, personality, abnormal and clinical psychology, cognition and learning, social psychology, developmental psychology, language, and applied contexts. Written by leading scientists in these disciplines, every article has been peer-reviewed to establish clarity, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. The most comprehensive reference source to provide both depth and breadth to the study of human behavior, the encyclopedia will again be a much-used reference source. This set appeals to public, corporate, university and college libraries, libraries in two-year colleges, and some secondary schools. Carefully crafted, well written, and thoroughly indexed, the encyclopedia helps users—whether they are students just beginning formal study of the broad field or specialists in a branch of psychology—understand the field and how and why humans behave as we do. Named a 2013 Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association's Choice publication Concise entries (ten pages on average) provide foundational knowledge of the field Each article features suggested further readings, a list of related websites, a 5-10 word glossary and a definition paragraph, and cross-references to related articles in the encyclopedi Newly expanded editorial board and a host of international contributors from the United States, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Sweden, and the United Kingdom
Download or read book Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management written by Jeffrey W. Herrmann and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-03-13 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: IIE/Joint Publishers Book of the Year Award 2016! Awarded for ‘an outstanding published book that focuses on a facet of industrial engineering, improves education, or furthers the profession’. Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management emphasizes practical issues and examples of decision making with applications in engineering design and management Featuring a blend of theoretical and analytical aspects, this book presents multiple perspectives on decision making to better understand and improve risk management processes and decision-making systems. Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management uniquely presents and discusses three perspectives on decision making: problem solving, the decision-making process, and decision-making systems. The author highlights formal techniques for group decision making and game theory and includes numerical examples to compare and contrast different quantitative techniques. The importance of initially selecting the most appropriate decision-making process is emphasized through practical examples and applications that illustrate a variety of useful processes. Presenting an approach for modeling and improving decision-making systems, Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management also features: Theoretically sound and practical tools for decision making under uncertainty, multi-criteria decision making, group decision making, the value of information, and risk management Practical examples from both historical and current events that illustrate both good and bad decision making and risk management processes End-of-chapter exercises for readers to apply specific learning objectives and practice relevant skills A supplementary website with instructional support material, including worked solutions to the exercises, lesson plans, in-class activities, slides, and spreadsheets An excellent textbook for upper-undergraduate and graduate students, Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management is appropriate for courses on decision analysis, decision making, and risk management within the fields of engineering design, operations research, business and management science, and industrial and systems engineering. The book is also an ideal reference for academics and practitioners in business and management science, operations research, engineering design, systems engineering, applied mathematics, and statistics.
Download or read book Rational Responses to Risks written by Paul Weirich and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book's philosophical account of risk makes precise, justifies, and systematizes a variety of decision principles drawn from various disciplines. Weirich's approach to rational choice yields a theory that explains the rationality of choices complying with decision principles and advances strong normative standards for both attitudes to risks and acts affecting risks. His theory aims to guide decisions about risks in finance, in professional advice to clients, and in government regulation of risks the public bears.
Download or read book Algorithmic Decision Theory written by Toby Walsh and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-08-27 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory , ADT 2015, held in September 2015 in Lexington, USA. The 32 full papers presented were carefully selected from 76 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as preferences; manipulation, learning and other issues; utility and decision theory; argumentation; bribery and control; social choice; allocation and other problems; doctoral consortium.
Download or read book Decision Theory With Imperfect Information written by Aliev Rafig Aziz and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2014-08-08 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day decision making in complex human-centric systems are characterized by imperfect decision-relevant information. The principal problems with the existing decision theories are that they do not have capability to deal with situations in which probabilities and events are imprecise. In this book, we describe a new theory of decision making with imperfect information. The aim is to shift the foundation of decision analysis and economic behavior from the realm bivalent logic to the realm fuzzy logic and Z-restriction, from external modeling of behavioral decisions to the framework of combined states.This book will be helpful for professionals, academics, managers and graduate students in fuzzy logic, decision sciences, artificial intelligence, mathematical economics, and computational economics.
Download or read book Algorithmic Decision Theory written by Francesca Rossi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains the papers presented at ADT 2009, the first International Conference on Algorithmic Decision Theory. The conference was held in San Servolo, a small island of the Venice lagoon, during October 20-23, 2009. The program of the conference included oral presentations, posters, invited talks, and tutorials. The conference received 65 submissions of which 39 papers were accepted (9 papers were posters). The topics of these papers range from computational social choice preference modeling, from uncertainty to preference learning, from multi-criteria decision making to game theory.
Download or read book Decision Theory as Philosophy written by Mark Kaplan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kaplan presents an accessible new variant on Bayesian decision theory.
Download or read book Fundamentals of the Fuzzy Logic Based Generalized Theory of Decisions written by Rafik Aziz Aliev and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-01-12 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every day decision making and decision making in complex human-centric systems are characterized by imperfect decision-relevant information. Main drawback of the existing decision theories is namely incapability to deal with imperfect information and modeling vague preferences. Actually, a paradigm of non-numerical probabilities in decision making has a long history and arose also in Keynes’s analysis of uncertainty. There is a need for further generalization – a move to decision theories with perception-based imperfect information described in NL. The languages of new decision models for human-centric systems should be not languages based on binary logic but human-centric computational schemes able to operate on NL-described information. Development of new theories is now possible due to an increased computational power of information processing systems which allows for computations with imperfect information, particularly, imprecise and partially true information, which are much more complex than computations over numbers and probabilities. The monograph exposes the foundations of a new decision theory with imperfect decision-relevant information on environment and a decision maker’s behavior. This theory is based on the synthesis of the fuzzy sets theory with perception-based information and the probability theory. The book is self containing and represents in a systematic way the decision theory with imperfect information into the educational systems. The book will be helpful for teachers and students of universities and colleges, for managers and specialists from various fields of business and economics, production and social sphere.
Download or read book Collective Rationality written by Paul Weirich and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Groups of people perform acts that are subject to standards of rationality. A committee may sensibly award fellowships, or may irrationally award them in violation of its own policies. A theory of collective rationality defines collective acts that are evaluable for rationality and formulates principles for their evaluation. This book argues that a group's act is evaluable for rationality if it is the products of acts its members fully control. It also argues that such an act is collectively rational if the acts of the group's members are rational. Efficiency is a goal of collective rationality, but not a requirement, except in cases where conditions are ideal for joint action and agents have rationally prepared for joint action. The people engaged in a game of strategy form a group, and the combination of their acts yields a collective act. If their collective act is rational, it constitutes a solution to their game. A theory of collective rationality yields principles concerning solutions to games. One principle requires that a solution constitute an equilibrium among the incentives of the agents in the game. In a cooperative game some agents are coalitions of individuals, and it may be impossible for all agents to pursue all incentives. Because rationality is attainable, the appropriate equilibrium standard for cooperative games requires that agents pursue only incentives that provide sufficient reasons to act. The book's theory of collective rationality supports an attainable equilibrium-standard for solutions to cooperative games and shows that its realization follows from individuals' rational acts. By extending the theory of rationality to groups, this book reveals the characteristics that make an act evaluable for rationality and the way rationality's evaluation of an act responds to the type of control its agent exercises over the act. The book's theory of collective rationality contributes to philosophical projects such as contractarian ethics and to practical projects such as the design of social institutions.
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 264 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 An Introduction to Decision Theory written by Martin Peterson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-30 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now revised and updated, this introduction to decision theory is both accessible and comprehensive, covering topics including decision making under ignorance and risk, the foundations of utility theory, the debate over subjective and objective probability, Bayesianism, causal decision theory, game theory, and social choice theory. No mathematical skills are assumed, with all concepts and results explained in non-technical and intuitive as well as more formal ways. There are now over 140 exercises with solutions, along with a glossary of key terms and concepts. This second edition includes a new chapter on risk aversion as well as updated discussions of numerous central ideas, including Newcomb's problem, prisoner's dilemmas, and Arrow's impossibility theorem. The book will appeal particularly to philosophy students but also to readers in a range of disciplines, from computer science and psychology to economics and political science.
Download or read book Case Based Reasoning Research and Development written by Lorraine McGinty and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-07-10 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Case-Based Reasoning, ICCBR 2009, held in Seattle, WA, USA, in July 2009. The 17 revised full papers and 17 revised poster papers presented together with 2 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. Covering a wide range of CBR topics of interest both to practitioners and researchers, the papers are devoted to theoretical/methodological as well as to applicative aspects of current CBR analysis.
Download or read book Oxford Studies in Epistemology Volume 6 written by Tamar Szabó Gendler and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 430 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oxford Studies in Epistemology is a biennial publication which offers a regular snapshot of state-of-the-art work in this important field. Under the guidance of a distinguished editorial board composed of leading philosophers in North America, Europe, and Australasia, it publishes exemplary papers in epistemology, broadly construed. Topics within its purview include: - traditional epistemological questions concerning the nature of belief, justification, and knowledge, the status of scepticism, the nature of the a priori, etc; - new developments in epistemology, including movements such as naturalized epistemology, feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and virtue epistemology, and approaches such as contextualism; - foundational questions in decision-theory; - confirmation theory and other branches of philosophy of science that bear on traditional issues in epistemology; - topics in the philosophy of perception relevant to epistemology; - topics in cognitive science, computer science, developmental, cognitive, and social psychology that bear directly on traditional epistemological questions; - work that examines connections between epistemology and other branches of philosophy, including work on testimony and the ethics of belief. Anyone wanting to understand the latest developments at the leading edge of the discipline can start here.
