5,203 research outputs found
Additive representations on rank-ordered sets. I. The algebraic approach
This paper considers additive conjoint measurement on subsets of Cartesian products containing ârank-orderedâ n-tuples. Contrary to what has often been thought, additive conjoint measurement on subsets of Cartesian products has characteristics different from additive conjoint measurement on full Cartesian products
Divergent mathematical treatments in utility theory
In this paper I study how divergent mathematical treatments affect mathematical modelling, with a special focus on utility theory. In particular I examine recent work on the ranking of information states and the discounting of future utilities, in order to show how, by replacing the standard analytical treatment of the models involved with one based on the framework of Nonstandard Analysis, diametrically opposite results are obtained. In both cases, the choice between the standard and nonstandard treatment amounts to a selection of set-theoretical parameters that cannot be made on purely empirical grounds. The analysis of this phenomenon gives rise to a simple logical account of the relativity of impossibility theorems in economic theory, which concludes the paper
Personality in Computational Advertising: A Benchmark
In the last decade, new ways of shopping online have increased the
possibility of buying products and services more easily and faster
than ever. In this new context, personality is a key determinant
in the decision making of the consumer when shopping. A personâs
buying choices are influenced by psychological factors like
impulsiveness; indeed some consumers may be more susceptible
to making impulse purchases than others. Since affective metadata
are more closely related to the userâs experience than generic
parameters, accurate predictions reveal important aspects of userâs
attitudes, social life, including attitude of others and social identity.
This work proposes a highly innovative research that uses a personality
perspective to determine the unique associations among the
consumerâs buying tendency and advert recommendations. In fact,
the lack of a publicly available benchmark for computational advertising
do not allow both the exploration of this intriguing research
direction and the evaluation of recent algorithms. We present the
ADS Dataset, a publicly available benchmark consisting of 300 real
advertisements (i.e., Rich Media Ads, Image Ads, Text Ads) rated
by 120 unacquainted individuals, enriched with Big-Five usersâ
personality factors and 1,200 personal usersâ pictures
Normative foundations of scarcity
The elevation of scarcity to the fundamental economic problem rests on some unstated normative assumptions. These include a political commitment to private property, a methodological commitment to not inquire about taste formation, and the idea that human welfare is roughly equivalent to preference satisfaction.Scarcity; Normative Positive Distinction; Fact Value Distinction; private property; welfare; revealed preference
A network centrality method for the rating problem
We propose a new method for aggregating the information of multiple reviewers
rating multiple products. Our approach is based on the network relations
induced between products by the rating activity of the reviewers. We show that
our method is algorithmically implementable even for large numbers of both
products and consumers, as is the case for many online sites. Moreover,
comparing it with the simple average, which is mostly used in practice, and
with other methods previously proposed in the literature, it performs very well
under various dimension, proving itself to be an optimal trade--off between
computational efficiency, accordance with the reviewers original orderings, and
robustness with respect to the inclusion of systematically biased reports.Comment: 25 pages, 8 figure
Quantum decision making by social agents
The influence of additional information on the decision making of agents, who
are interacting members of a society, is analyzed within the mathematical
framework based on the use of quantum probabilities. The introduction of social
interactions, which influence the decisions of individual agents, leads to a
generalization of the quantum decision theory developed earlier by the authors
for separate individuals. The generalized approach is free of the standard
paradoxes of classical decision theory. This approach also explains the
error-attenuation effects observed for the paradoxes occurring when decision
makers, who are members of a society, consult with each other, increasing in
this way the available mutual information. A precise correspondence between
quantum decision theory and classical utility theory is formulated via the
introduction of an intermediate probabilistic version of utility theory of a
novel form, which obeys the requirement that zero-utility prospects should have
zero probability weights.Comment: This paper has been withdrawn by the authors because a much extended
and improved version has been submitted as arXiv:1510.02686 under the new
title "Role of information in decision making of social agents
Rationality and dynamic consistency under risk and uncertainty
For choice with deterministic consequences, the standard rationality hypothesis is ordinality - i.e., maximization of a weak preference ordering. For choice under risk (resp. uncertainty), preferences are assumed to be represented by the objectively (resp. subjectively) expected value of a von Neumann{Morgenstern utility function. For choice under risk, this implies a key independence axiom; under uncertainty, it implies some version of Savage's sure thing principle. This chapter investigates the extent to which ordinality, independence, and the sure thing principle can be derived from more fundamental axioms concerning behaviour in decision trees. Following Cubitt (1996), these principles include dynamic consistency, separability, and reduction of sequential choice, which can be derived in turn from one consequentialist hypothesis applied to continuation subtrees as well as entire decision trees. Examples of behavior violating these principles are also reviewed, as are possible explanations of why such violations are often observed in experiments
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