The Evolutionary Stability of Optimism, Pessimism and Complete Ignorance

We provide an evolutionary foundation to evidence that in some situations humans maintain optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of the environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents’ actions and maximize individually their Choquet expected utility. Our Choquet expected utility model allows for both an optimistic or pessimistic attitude towards uncertainty as well as ignorance to strategic dependencies. An optimist (resp. pessimist) overweights good (resp. bad) outcomes. A complete ignorant never reacts to opponents’ change of actions. With qualifications we show that optimistic (resp. pessimistic) complete ignorance is evolutionary stable / yields a strategic advantage in submodular (resp. supermodular) games with aggregate externalities. Moreover, this evolutionary stable preference leads to Walrasian behavior in those classes of games

Powellsnakes II: a fast Bayesian approach to discrete object detection in multi-frequency astronomical data sets

Powellsnakes is a Bayesian algorithm for detecting compact objects embedded in a diffuse background, and was selected and successfully employed by the Planck consortium in the production of its first public deliverable: the Early Release Compact Source Catalogue (ERCSC). We present the critical foundations and main directions of further development of PwS, which extend it in terms of formal correctness and the optimal use of all the available information in a consistent unified framework, where no distinction is made between point sources (unresolved objects), SZ clusters, single or multi-channel detection. An emphasis is placed on the necessity of a multi-frequency, multi-model detection algorithm in order to achieve optimality

The Ignorant Observer

Most prominent models of economic justice (and especially those proposed by Harsanyi and Rawls) are based on the assumption that impartiality is required for making moral decisions. However, although Harsanyi and Rawls agree on that, and furthermore agree on the fact that impartiality can be obtained under appropriate conditions of ignorance, they strongly disagree on the consequences of these assumptions. According to Harsanyi, they provide a justification for the utilitarian doctrine, whereas Rawls considers that they imply egalitarianism. We propose here an extension of Harsanyi's Impartial Observer Theorem, that is based on the representation of ignorance as the set of all possible probability distributions. We obtain a characterization of the observer's preferences that, under our most restrictive conditions, is a linear combination of Harsanyi's and Rawls' criteria. Furthermore, this representation is ethically meaningful, in the sense that individuals' utilities are cardinally measurable and unit comparable. This allows us to conclude that the impartiality requirement cannot be used to decide between Rawls' and Harsanyi's positions. Finally, we defend the view that a (strict) combination of Harsanyi's and Rawls' criteria provides a reasonable rule for social decisions.Impartiality, justice, decision under ignorance.