How incidental values from the environment affect decisions about money, risk, and delay

How different are £0.50 and £1.50, or "a small chance" and "a good chance", or "three months" and "nine months"? Our experiments show that people behave as if these differences alter after incidental everyday experiences. Preference for a £1.50 lottery rather than a £0.50 lottery was stronger after exposure to intermediate supermarket prices. Preference for "a good chance" of winning rather than "a small chance" was stronger after predicting intermediate probabilities of rain. Preference for consumption in "three month" rather than "nine months" was stronger after planning for an intermediate birthday. These fluctuations offer a direct challenge to economic accounts which translate monies, risks, and delays into subjective equivalents by stable functions. The decision by sampling model, in which subjective values are rank positions constructed from comparisons with samples of monies, probabilities, or delays, predicts these effects and indicates a primary role for sampling in decision making

Belief functions contextual discounting and canonical decompositions

AbstractIn this article, the contextual discounting of a belief function, a classical discounting generalization, is extended and its particular link with the canonical disjunctive decomposition is highlighted. A general family of correction mechanisms allowing one to weaken the information provided by a source is then introduced, as well as the dual of this family allowing one to strengthen a belief function

The SECURE collaboration model

The SECURE project has shown how trust can be made computationally tractable while retaining a reasonable connection with human and social notions of trust. SECURE has produced a well-founded theory of trust that has been tested and refined through use in real software such as collaborative spam filtering and electronic purse. The software comprises the SECURE kernel with extensions for policy specification by application developers. It has yet to be applied to large-scale, multi-domain distributed systems taking different application contexts into account. The project has not considered privacy in evidence distribution, a crucial issue for many application domains, including public services such as healthcare and police. The SECURE collaboration model has similarities with the trust domain concept, embodying the interaction set of a principal, but SECURE is primarily concerned with pseudonymous entities rather than domain-structured systems

Evidence fusion with contextual discounting for multi-modality medical image segmentation

As information sources are usually imperfect, it is necessary to take into account their reliability in multi-source information fusion tasks. In this paper, we propose a new deep framework allowing us to merge multi-MR image segmentation results using the formalism of Dempster-Shafer theory while taking into account the reliability of different modalities relative to different classes. The framework is composed of an encoder-decoder feature extraction module, an evidential segmentation module that computes a belief function at each voxel for each modality, and a multi-modality evidence fusion module, which assigns a vector of discount rates to each modality evidence and combines the discounted evidence using Dempster's rule. The whole framework is trained by minimizing a new loss function based on a discounted Dice index to increase segmentation accuracy and reliability. The method was evaluated on the BraTs 2021 database of 1251 patients with brain tumors. Quantitative and qualitative results show that our method outperforms the state of the art, and implements an effective new idea for merging multi-information within deep neural networks.Comment: MICCAI202

Context-dependent Trust Decisions with Subjective Logic

A decision procedure implemented over a computational trust mechanism aims to allow for decisions to be made regarding whether some entity or information should be trusted. As recognised in the literature, trust is contextual, and we describe how such a context often translates into a confidence level which should be used to modify an underlying trust value. J{\o}sang's Subjective Logic has long been used in the trust domain, and we show that its operators are insufficient to address this problem. We therefore provide a decision-making approach about trust which also considers the notion of confidence (based on context) through the introduction of a new operator. In particular, we introduce general requirements that must be respected when combining trustworthiness and confidence degree, and demonstrate the soundness of our new operator with respect to these properties.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figures, technical report of the University of Aberdeen (preprint version

Kohonen-Based Credal Fusion of Optical and Radar Images for Land Cover Classification

International audienceThis paper presents a Credal algorithm to perform land cover classification from a pair of optical and radar remote sensing images. SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar) /optical multispectral information fusion is investigated in this study for making the joint classification. The approach consists of two main steps: 1) relevant features extraction applied to each sensor in order to model the sources of information and 2) a Kohonen map-based estimation of Basic Belief Assignments (BBA) dedicated to heterogeneous data. This framework deals with co-registered images and is able to handle complete optical data as well as optical data affected by missing value due to the presence of clouds and shadows during observation. A pair of SPOT-5 and RADARSAT-2 real images is used in the evaluation, and the proposed experiment in a farming area shows very promising results in terms of classification accuracy and missing optical data reconstruction when some data are hidden by clouds

Games Daughters and Parents Play: Teenage Childbearing, Parental Reputation, and Strategic Transfers

In this paper, we examine the empirical implications of reputation formation using a game-theoretic model of intra-familial interactions. We consider parental reputation in repeated two-stage games in which daughters' decision to have a child as a teenager and the willingness of parents to continue to house and support their daughters given their decisions. Drawing on the work of Milgrom and Roberts (1982) and Kreps and Wilson (1982) on reputation in repeated games, we show that parents have, under certain conditions, the incentive to penalize teenage (and typically out-of-wedlock) childbearing of older daughters, in order to get the younger daughters to avoid teenage childbearing. The two key empirical implications of this model is that the likelihood of teenage childbearing and parental transfers to a daughter who had a teen birth will decrease with the number of the daughter's sisters at risk. We test these two implications, using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, 1979 Cohort (NLSY79), exploiting the availability of repeated observations on young women (daughters) and of observations on multiple daughters (sisters) available in this data. Controlling for daughter- and family-specific fixed effects, we find evidence of differential parental financial transfer responses to teenage childbearing by the number of the daughter's sisters and brothers at risk.

Behavioral Economics: Past, Present, Future

Behavioral economics increases the explanatory power of economics by providing it with more realistic psychological foundations. This book consists of representative recent articles in behavioral economics. This chapter is intended to provide an introduction to the approach and methods of behavioral economics, and to some of its major findings, applications, and promising new directions. It also seeks to fill some unavoidable gaps in the chapters’ coverage of topics