Confidence in preferences

Indeterminate preferences have long been a tricky subject for choice theory. One reason for which preferences may be less than fully determinate is the lack of confidence in one’s preferences. In this paper, a representation of confidence in preferences is proposed. It is used to develop an account of the role which confidence which rests on the following intuition: the more important the decision to be taken, the more confidence is required in the preferences needed to take it. An axiomatisation of this choice rule is proposed. This theory provides a natural account of when an agent should defer a decision; namely, when the importance of the decision exceeds his confidence in the relevant preferences. Possible applications of the notion of confidence in preferences to social choice are briefly explored.Incomplete preference; Revealed preference; Confidence in preferences; Deferral of decisions; Importance of decisions; Social choice

Preferences and decision making in large-scale communities

Understanding the formation of preferences as they relate to decision making is a crucial task in identifying aspects of major projects; however, current literature has a deficit of this focus in regards to large-scale projects and large communities. This study aims to bolster the understanding of these large community preferences as they relate to large-scale projects. The study was conducted at two American Astronomical Society (AAS) conferences to gain information from the astrophysics community regarding NASA Decadal missions. Community preferences for Decadal missions are assessed through the Decadal Survey to summarize the opinions of the astronomical community regarding which missions should be prioritized in the next decade of NASA research. Data were collected using an online survey intended to measure community preferences. Researchers hypothesized that community preferences for engineering attributes of large-scale projects would differ, such as preferences for attributes such as the profitability of the mission, efficiency, reliability, resilience, etc. Conditions were derived from actual responses, and participants were sorted into four existing conditions: industry, academia, undergraduate/graduate students, and other communities. Most results were insignificant, but support was found that community preferences differed, particularly preferences of industry and academia versus students. Implications of this research suggest that project leaders of Decadal missions should take into consideration the preferences of each community separately. When predicting the decisions that agencies and communities will made, understanding the differences in the type of preferences formed will provide a valuable tool

Strange but true: Corroboration and base rate neglect

How do we deal with unlikely witness testimonies? Whether in legal or everyday reasoning, corroborative evidence is generally considered a strong marker of support for the reported hypothesis. However, questions remain regarding how the prior probability, or base rate, of that hypothesis interacts with corroboration. Using a Bayesian network model, we illustrate an inverse relationship between the base rate of a hypothesis, and the support provided by corroboration. More precisely, as the base rate of hypothesis becomes more unlikely (and thus there is lower expectation of corroborating testimony), each piece of confirming testimony provides a nonlinear increase in support, relative to a more commonplace hypothesis-assuming independence between witnesses. We show across 3 experiments that lay reasoners consistently fail to account for this impact of (rare) base rates in both diagnostic and intercausal reasoning, resulting in substantial underestimation in belief updating. We consider this a novel demonstration of an inverted form of base rate neglect. We highlight the implications of this work for any scenario in which one cannot assume the confirmation or disconfirmation of a reported hypothesis is uniform.

The Comprehensiveness Dilemma of Cost-Benefit Analysis

Most project impacts on environment, climate, and health are not valued in markets or in choice situations similar to market transactions. Analysts have to go beyond revealed preferences to stated preference interviews and even to deliberative processes in order to elicit preferences from which the trade-off values (‘prices’) of the expanded cost-benefit analysis (CBA) can be deduced. The comprehensiveness dilemma of social CBA arises with the choice between calculation of ‘prices’ from revealed preferences and communicative construction of ‘prices’ on the basis of preferences stated in deliberation. New methods for eliciting preferences, such as deliberative monetary valuation, yield preferences influenced by ethical and political values. The interpretation of the analytic results then becomes problematic. The comprehensiveness dilemma is that planners must choose between a narrow CBA making good economic sense, and a comprehensive CBA with dubious economic content. By aiming for completeness, CBA changes character from being a summation of changes in individual wellbeing to being a mix of this and the summation of monetary expressions of ethical and political viewpoints and attitudes

Essays on the Behavioral Foundations of Choice

The research presented in this dissertation contributes to the literature on choice and decision theory. Chapter 2 presents generalizations of two well-known boundedly rational choice proce- dures. Our generalization consists of defining these procedures as choice correspondences, instead of choice functions. In turn, this imposes less of a restriction on the contained rationales and allows for the decision maker to be indecisive. We provide the axiomatic characterizations of our generalizations by extending the axioms used to characterize the original procedures. Furthermore, we discuss ways in which an indecisive decision maker may arrive at a unique choice and show that our proposed generalizations can explain choice anomalies that cannot be accommodated in the original setup. Chapter 3 introduces a two-period model of individual decision-making, in which the decision maker derives utility from both future consumption and present anticipation of such consumption. Specifically, we consider a setting in which the decision maker may choose her anticipation and where this choice of anticipation, in turn, determines her reference point. In this setting, we formulate equilibrium concepts that dictate feasible choices of anticipation and consumption lotteries based on when the decision maker com- mits to her decision. In addition, we show that our model on the domain of choice is equivalent to a two-stage choice procedure based on the concept of consideration sets. We provide the axiomatic characterization of the choice procedure, and hence by extension, a characterization of our model of anticipation-based reference-dependent preferences. Fi- nally, we show the extent to which the decision maker’s preferences and consideration set can be identified from choice data. Chapter 4 assesses the predictive capability of simple linear social preference models by using flexible machine learning models as a benchmark. Specifically, based on exper- imental observations from the lab on binary dictator games and reciprocity games, we apply the recent introduced concept of a model’s completeness by comparing its predic- tive performance to that of (i) a naive baseline model that is stripped of other-regarding preferences, and (ii) a non-parametric machine learning model capable of capturing the predictive variation in the data. In turn, this provides us with information on (i) how large a fraction of the predictable variation in the data a given social preference model captures, and (ii) how large a gain in performance the model brings by introducing other-regarding motives compared to a naive baseline model. To address the potential remaining patterns in the data that are not captured on the level of the representative agent, we also conduct the analysis in a mixture model framework allowing for heterogeneity in the estimated parameters

Vamping the Archive: Approaching Aesthetics in Global Media

CARGC Paper 8, “Vamping the Archive: Approaching Aesthetics in Global Media,” by CARGC Postdoctoral Fellow, Rayya El Zein, is based on El Zein’s CARGC Colloquium and draws its inspiration from Metro al-Madina\u27s Hishik Bishik Show in Beirut. CARGC Paper 8 weaves assessments of local and regional contexts, aesthetic and performance theory, thick description, participant observation, and interview to develop an approach to aesthetics in cultural production from the vantage of global media studies that she calls “vamping the archive.”https://repository.upenn.edu/cargc_papers/1007/thumbnail.jp

Ranking Small Business Resistance Criteria Toward the Affordable Care Act

Following the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2010, politicians, media, and lobbyists rendered a number of conflicting and confusing interpretations of its merits and demerits. Such interpretations intensified the skepticism and concerns of small business enterprise (SBE) owners. The purpose of this study was to develop a representative, prioritized list of SBE owners\u27 concerns or resistance factors. The goal was to create a useful guide for SBE owners who are seeking ways to reducing the adverse financial impact of the law. With social choice theory as the theoretical framework, 50 randomly selected SBE owners across 5 distinct industry groups from Richmond, Virginia, participated in an online, cross-sectional, pairwise comparison survey. The overall results of an analytic hierarchy process indicated that the top-ranked resistance factor of SBE owners was insurance premiums, followed by quality of care and the tax burden. However, these rankings were not uniform among industry groups. With a focus on these crucial concerns, SBE owners could benefit by seeking approaches to reduce the business costs of health care. The implications for positive social change include the potential for business organizations, researchers, and policymakers to channel SBE owners\u27 voice for a socioeconomic growth by addressing their concerns in seeking improvements from the ACA

Measuring freedom, and its value

This thesis concerns the measurement of freedom, and its value. Specifically, I am concerned with three overarching questions. First, can we measure the extent of an individual’s freedom? It had better be that we can, otherwise much ordinary and intuitive talk that we would like to vindicate – say, about free persons being freer than slaves – will turn out to be false or meaningless. Second, in what ways is freedom valuable, and how is this value measured? It matters, for example, whether freedom is valuable only insofar as it enables us to pursue specific ends we happen to value for independent reasons, or whether it is also valuable in itself. In the latter case, but not the former, more freedom will always (other things being equal) be better. Likewise, it’s important to get clarity on what ends, exactly, freedom is especially instrumentally valuable in promoting, since this goes to how much we should care about it. And finally, the liberal political tradition asserts that there is a special sphere of personal choices within which individuals should be free to do as they please, for reasons over and above the value of freedom itself. Now, can we measure the extent to which states and individuals respect individual liberties, and can we weigh the importance of respecting liberty against competing values like social welfare? To answer these questions, I follow the axiomatic tradition of social choice theory, and I develop several novel measures of freedom – including the first measure of freedom ever proposed that is sensitive to how modally robustly our options are available – a novel approach to measuring the diversity of an opportunity set, and I develop an account of the value of freedom according to which an important part of why freedom matters is that it enables us to improve our preferences through learning, and I construct ways of measuring the value of freedom along this dimension of value. Finally, in later chapters, I provide a representation result for a measure of illiberalism, i.e. of the degree to which states fail to respect the rights of their citizens, and I extend this result to provide a characterization of moral theories that express concern for respecting the rights of others. The final chapter closes by discussing how this concern may be weighed against concerns for social welfare