Fuzziness, Indeterminacy and Soft Sets: Frontiers and Perspectives

The present paper comes across the main steps that laid from Zadeh's fuzziness ana Atanassov's intuitionistic fuzzy sets to Smarandache's indeterminacy and to Molodstov's soft sets. Two hybrid methods for assessment and decision making respectively under fuzzy conditions are also presented through suitable examples that use soft sets and real intervals as tools. The decision making method improves an earlier method of Maji et al. Further, it is described how the concept of topological space, the most general category of mathematical spaces, can be extended to fuzzy structures and how to generalize the fundamental mathematical concepts of limit, continuity compactness and Hausdorff space within such kind of structures. In particular, fuzzy and soft topological spaces are defined and examples are given to illustrate these generalizations.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figures, 3 Tables, 30n reference

Games under Ambiguous Payoffs and Optimistic Attitudes

In real-life games, the consequence or payoff of a strategy profile and a player's belief about the consequence of a strategy profile are often ambiguous, and players may have different optimistic attitudes with respect to a strategy profile. To handle this problem, this paper proposes a decision rule using the Hurwicz criterion and Dempster-Shafer theory. Based on this rule, we introduce a new kind of games, called ambiguous games, and propose a solution concept that is appropriate for this sort of games. Moreover, we also study how the beliefs regarding possible payoffs and optimistic attitudes may affect the solutions of such a game. To illustrate our model, we provide an analysis of a scenario concerning allocating resource of defending and attacking in military contexts

"The Way in which an Experiment is Conducted is Unbelievably Important": On the Experimentation Practices of Economists and Psychologists

To discuss experimental results without discussing how they came about makes sense when the results are robust to the way experiments are conducted. Experimental results, however, are – arguably more often than not – sensitive to numerous design and implementation characteristics such as the use of financial incentives, deception, and the way information is presented. To the extent that economists and psychologists have different experimental practices, this claim is of obvious practical and interpretative relevance. In light of the empirical results summarized below, it seems warranted to say that it does not make sense to report experimental results without reporting the design and implementation choices that were made.Duhem-Quine problem, experimental design, experimental implementation, financial incentives, deception