A Quantum-Conceptual Explanation of Violations of Expected Utility in Economics

The expected utility hypothesis is one of the building blocks of classical economic theory and founded on Savage's Sure-Thing Principle. It has been put forward, e.g. by situations such as the Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes, that real-life situations can violate Savage's Sure-Thing Principle and hence also expected utility. We analyze how this violation is connected to the presence of the 'disjunction effect' of decision theory and use our earlier study of this effect in concept theory to put forward an explanation of the violation of Savage's Sure-Thing Principle, namely the presence of 'quantum conceptual thought' next to 'classical logical thought' within a double layer structure of human thought during the decision process. Quantum conceptual thought can be modeled mathematically by the quantum mechanical formalism, which we illustrate by modeling the Hawaii problem situation, a well-known example of the disjunction effect, and we show how the dynamics in the Hawaii problem situation is generated by the whole conceptual landscape surrounding the decision situation.Comment: 9 pages, no figure

Quantum Risk Preferences in a Laboratory Experiment

   This paper presents a quantum model of risk preferences that seeks to provide an explanation of the experimental results reported in Berninghaus, Todorova & Vogt (2012). The finding that subjects choose the risk-dominant strategy in a 2× 2 coordination game, on the average, more often, when they have previously completed a risk questionnaire, is not anticipated by the standard economic theory. The model presented in this paper demonstrates that the coordination game and the risk questionnaire can be analyzed as two decisions situations that do not commute and predicts that the order in which decisions are made will influence behavioral choices. &nbsp

Collective Decision Making as the Actualization of Decision Potential

This paper presents some characteristics and dilemmas of collective decision making. Collective decision making could be presented as the process of successive crystallization of dominant alternatives under the influence of different decision contexts from primary given decision potentials. This process is presented as the many-phased process of the acting of contextually dependent "energizing factors" of the collective decision making on the "attractiveness matrix" of outcomes of collective decisions. The attractiveness matrix determines the attractiveness for each alternative of decision, and the most attractive alternative in the given situation presents the rational decision in the given situation. In the final phase of decision making holds a context which gets a simplified attractiveness matrix. It corresponds to the common decision for one of the alternatives.collective decision making, rationality, decision potential, joint outcomes, energizing

Interference Effects in Quantum Belief Networks

Probabilistic graphical models such as Bayesian Networks are one of the most powerful structures known by the Computer Science community for deriving probabilistic inferences. However, modern cognitive psychology has revealed that human decisions could not follow the rules of classical probability theory, because humans cannot process large amounts of data in order to make judgements. Consequently, the inferences performed are based on limited data coupled with several heuristics, leading to violations of the law of total probability. This means that probabilistic graphical models based on classical probability theory are too limited to fully simulate and explain various aspects of human decision making. Quantum probability theory was developed in order to accommodate the paradoxical findings that the classical theory could not explain. Recent findings in cognitive psychology revealed that quantum probability can fully describe human decisions in an elegant framework. Their findings suggest that, before taking a decision, human thoughts are seen as superposed waves that can interfere with each other, influencing the final decision. In this work, we propose a new Bayesian Network based on the psychological findings of cognitive scientists. We made experiments with two very well known Bayesian Networks from the literature. The results obtained revealed that the quantum like Bayesian Network can affect drastically the probabilistic inferences, specially when the levels of uncertainty of the network are very high (no pieces of evidence observed). When the levels of uncertainty are very low, then the proposed quantum like network collapses to its classical counterpart

Collective Decision Making as the Actualization of Decision Potential

This paper presents some characteristics and dilemmas of collective decision making. Collective decision making could be presented as the process of successive crystallization of dominant alternatives under the influence of different decision contexts from primary given decision potentials. This process is presented as the many-phased process of the acting of contextually dependent “energizing factors” of the collective decision making on the “attractiveness matrix” of outcomes of collective decisions. The attractiveness matrix determines the attractiveness for each alternative of decision, and the most attractive alternative in the given situation presents the rational decision in the given situation. In the final phase of decision making holds a context which gets a simplified attractiveness matrix. It corresponds to the common decision for one of the alternatives