Subjective Expected Utility and Psychological Gambles

We obtain an elementary characterization of expected utility based on a representation of choice in terms of psychological gambles, which requires no assumption other than coherence between ex-ante and ex-post preferences. Weaker version of coherence are associated with various attitudes towards complexity and lead to a characterization of minimax or Choquet expected utility

Parent participation at school: a research study on the perspectives of children

The present article discusses the attitude of children towards parent participation at school. To this end, a quantitative study was conducted among 250 10-year-old children in Flanders. The analysis shows that children tend to rather like parent participation, and that this attitude is related to the extent to which parents participate. Children from 'deprived' schools tend to like parent participation better. This article argues that children should be approached as fully-fledged, active participants in their parents' participation process and that it is necessary to take account of the specific perspectives of children on this topic

ISIPTA'07: Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium on Imprecise Probability: Theories and Applications

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Imprecise Markov chains and their limit behaviour

When the initial and transition probabilities of a finite Markov chain in discrete time are not well known, we should perform a sensitivity analysis. This can be done by considering as basic uncertainty models the so-called credal sets that these probabilities are known or believed to belong to, and by allowing the probabilities to vary over such sets. This leads to the definition of an imprecise Markov chain. We show that the time evolution of such a system can be studied very efficiently using so-called lower and upper expectations, which are equivalent mathematical representations of credal sets. We also study how the inferred credal set about the state at time n evolves as n goes to infinity: under quite unrestrictive conditions, it converges to a uniquely invariant credal set, regardless of the credal set given for the initial state. This leads to a non-trivial generalisation of the classical Perron-Frobenius Theorem to imprecise Markov chains.Comment: v1: 28 pages, 8 figures; v2: 31 pages, 9 figures, major revision after review: added, modified, and removed material (no results dropped, results added), moved proofs to an appendi