78,391 research outputs found

    Numerical Representations of Acceptance

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    Accepting a proposition means that our confidence in this proposition is strictly greater than the confidence in its negation. This paper investigates the subclass of uncertainty measures, expressing confidence, that capture the idea of acceptance, what we call acceptance functions. Due to the monotonicity property of confidence measures, the acceptance of a proposition entails the acceptance of any of its logical consequences. In agreement with the idea that a belief set (in the sense of Gardenfors) must be closed under logical consequence, it is also required that the separate acceptance o two propositions entail the acceptance of their conjunction. Necessity (and possibility) measures agree with this view of acceptance while probability and belief functions generally do not. General properties of acceptance functions are estabilished. The motivation behind this work is the investigation of a setting for belief revision more general than the one proposed by Alchourron, Gardenfors and Makinson, in connection with the notion of conditioning.Comment: Appears in Proceedings of the Eleventh Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI1995

    Partnerships

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    This paper analyzes the endogenous formation of a partnership as the trade-off between efficiency gains and a 'cost' associated with the partial loss of control over the decisions the partnership takes. For instance, by forming a monetary union, countries benefit from a more coordinated monetary policy. However, due to the partial loss of control over the union decision, the policy implemented might differ from the policy a member would have taken on their own. We interpret this possible difference as a cost. We notably show that individuals with ''similar" characteristics form a partnership, and the more diverse the characteristics, the smaller the partnership size.partnerships, coalitions, alliances, endogenous formation, efficiency gains, loss of control, diverse characteristics, opinions

    The Evolutionary Stability of Optimism, Pessimism and Complete Ignorance

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    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

    Metacognitive Development and Conceptual Change in Children

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    There has been little investigation to date of the way metacognition is involved in conceptual change. It has been recognised that analytic metacognition is important to the way older children acquire more sophisticated scientific and mathematical concepts at school. But there has been barely any examination of the role of metacognition in earlier stages of concept acquisition, at the ages that have been the major focus of the developmental psychology of concepts. The growing evidence that even young children have a capacity for procedural metacognition raises the question of whether and how these abilities are involved in conceptual development. More specifically, are there developmental changes in metacognitive abilities that have a wholescale effect on the way children acquire new concepts and replace existing concepts? We show that there is already evidence of at least one plausible example of such a link and argue that these connections deserve to be investigated systematically

    Optimism and Pessimism in Games.

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    This paper considers the impact of ambiguity in strategic situations. It extends the earlier literature by allowing for optimistic responses to ambiguity. Ambiguity is modelled by CEU preferences. We study comparative statics of changes in ambiguity-attitude in games with strategic complements or substitutes. This gives a precise statement of the impact of ambiguity on economic behaviour. We also the possibility that players may be overconfident in the sense of over-estimating the probability of favourable outcomes. This has a similar effect of increasing equilibrium strategies in games of strategic complements, Finally we consider RDEU preferences.Ambiguity in games, overcon?fidence, strategic complementarity, optimism, RDEU.

    Signaling Competence in Elections

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    We analyze how political candidates can signal their competence and show that polarization might be a way of doing this. For this purpose, we study a unidimensional Hotelling-Downs model of electoral competition in which a fraction of candidates have the ability to correctly observe a policy-relevant state of the world. We show that candidates tend to polarize, even in the absence of policy bias. This is because proposing an extreme platform has a competence signaling effect and has a strictly higher probability of winning than proposing a median platform. The degree of polarization depends on how uncertain is the state of the world

    THOUGHTS ON BUILDING AN ACADEMIC CAREER

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    We have many routes to success in agricultural economics: extension education, resident teaching, advising, research, and public service. In selecting problems to study we must be sensitive to needs of all our clientele. Several production economics concepts are relevant to allocating our own efforts. Noticing, recognizing, and experiencing surprise aid scientific discovery. We need to use heuristics, intuition, deduction, and induction, though consideration of science's ideal and real types shows that all these mental processes are fallible. We need special theories that have broad application. Replication deserves high priority. A few thoughts on the manuscript review process are presented.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,
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