Beliefs, Interactions and Preferences in Decision Making mixes a selection of papers, presented at the Eighth Foundations and Applications of Utility and Risk Theory (`FUR VIII') conference in Mons, Belgium, together with a few solicited papers from well-known authors in the field. This book addresses some of the questions that have recently emerged in the research on decision-making and risk theory. In particular, authors have modeled more and more as interactions between the individual and the environment or between different individuals the emergence of beliefs as well as the specific type of information treatment traditionally called `rationality'. This book analyzes several cases of such an interaction and derives consequences for the future of decision theory and risk theory. In the last ten years, modeling beliefs has become a specific sub-field of decision making, particularly with respect to low probability events. Rational decision making has also been generalized in order to encompass, in new ways and in more general situations than it used to be fitted to, multiple dimensions in consequences. This book deals with some of the most conspicuous of these advances. It also addresses the difficult question to incorporate several of these recent advances simultaneously into one single decision model. And it offers perspectives about the future trends of modeling such complex decision questions. The volume is organized in three main blocks: The first block is the more `traditional' one. It deals with new extensions of the existing theory, as is always demanded by scientists in the field. A second block handles specific elements in the development of interactions between individuals and their environment, as defined in the most general sense. The last block confronts real-world problems in both financial and non-financial markets and decisions, and tries to show what kind of contributions can be brought to them by the type of research reported on here.

Amos Tversky (1937–1996), a towering figure in cognitive and mathematical psychology, devoted his professional life to the study of similarity, judgment, and decision making. He had a unique ability to master the technicalities of normative ideals and then to intuit and demonstrate experimentally their systematic violation due to the vagaries and consequences of human information processing. He created new areas of study and helped transform disciplines as varied as economics, law, medicine, political science, philosophy, and statistics. This book collects forty of Tversky's articles, selected by him in collaboration with the editor during the last months of Tversky's life. It is divided into three sections: Similarity, Judgment, and Preferences. The Preferences section is subdivided into Probabilistic Models of Choice, Choice under Risk and Uncertainty, and Contingent Preferences. Included are several articles written with his frequent collaborator, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman.

A group of pre-eminent figures offer a conspectus of the interaction of game theory, logic and episemology in the formal models of knowledge, belief, deliberation and learning.

This innovative volume is focused on the relationship between religion on the one hand and political and judicial rights on the other. At a time when the so-called ‘checks and balances’ that guarantee the vulnerable equilibrium between legislative, executive and judicial branches of governance are increasingly under pressure, this book offers valuable insights. It presents empirical work that has measured young people’s attitudes and explains the variety found across their views. Readers will find answers to the question: To what extent do youths in different countries support political and judicial human rights and what influences their attitudes towards these rights? The political rights in this question include, among others, active and passive voting right, the right to protest, and the rights of refugees. Judicial rights refer in general to the right of a fair trial, and include principles like equality before the law; the right to independent and impartial judgement; the presumption of innocence; the right to legal counsel; and the privilege against self-incrimination. Expert contributing authors look at aspects such as religious beliefs and practices, personal evaluation of state authorities, and personality characteristics. The authors discuss contextual determinants for attitudes towards political and judicial rights, in both theory and empirical indicators. Numerous helpful tables and figures support the written word. This book makes an original contribution to research through the empirical clarification of factors that induce or reduce people’s support of political and judicial rights. It will appeal to graduates and researchers in religious studies, philosophy or sociology of religion, among other disciplines, but it will also interest the general reader who is concerned with matters of human rights and social justice.

At the core of the many debates throughout cognitive science concerning how decisions are made are the processes governing the time course of preference formation and decision. From perceptual choices, such as whether the signal on a radar screen indicates an enemy missile or a spot on a CT scan indicates a tumor, to cognitive value-based decisions, such as selecting an agreeable flatmate or deciding the guilt of a defendant, significant and everyday decisions are dynamic over time. Phenomena such as decoy effects, preference reversals and order effects are still puzzling researchers. For example, in a legal context, jurors receive discrete pieces of evidence in sequence, and must integrate these pieces together to reach a singular verdict. From a standard Bayesian viewpoint the order in which people receive the evidence should not influence their final decision, and yet order effects seem a robust empirical phenomena in many decision contexts. Current research on how decisions unfold, especially in a dynamic environment, is advancing our theoretical understanding of decision making. This Research Topic aims to review and further explore the time course of a decision - from how prior beliefs are formed to how those beliefs are used and updated over time, towards the formation of preferences and choices and post-decision processes and effects. Research literatures encompassing varied approaches to the time-scale of decisions will be brought into scope: a) Speeded decisions (and post-decision processes) that require the accumulation of noisy and possibly non-stationary perceptual evidence (e.g., randomly moving dots stimuli), within a few seconds, with or without temporal uncertainty. b) Temporally-extended, value-based decisions that integrate feedback values (e.g., gambling machines) and internally-generated decision criteria (e.g., when one switches attention, selectively, between the various aspects of several choice alternatives). c) Temporally extended, belief-based decisions that build on the integration of evidence, which interacts with the decision maker's belief system, towards the updating of the beliefs and the formation of judgments and preferences (as in the legal context). Research that emphasizes theoretical concerns (including optimality analysis) and mechanisms underlying the decision process, both neural and cognitive, is presented, as well as research that combines experimental and computational levels of analysis.

Table of contents

Conjoint analysis is probably the most significant development in marketing research in the past few decades. It can be described as a set of techniques ideally suited to studying customers’ decision-making processes and determining tradeoffs. Though this book is oriented towards methods and applications of conjoint analysis in marketing, conjoint methods are also applicable for other business and social sciences. After an introduction to the basic ideas of conjoint analysis the book describes the steps involved in designing a ratings-based conjoint study, it covers various methods for estimating partworth functions from preference ratings data, and dedicates a chapter on methods of design and analysis of conjoint-based choice experiments, where choice is measured directly. Chapter 5 describes several methods for handling a large number of attributes. Chapters 6 through 8 discuss the use of conjoint analysis for specific applications like product and service design or product line decisions, product positioning and market segmentation decisions, and pricing decisions. Chapter 9 collates miscellaneous applications of marketing mix including marketing resource allocation or store location decisions. Finally, Chapter 10 reviews more recent developments in experimental design and data analysis and presents an assessment of future developments.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, ACII 2007. It covers affective facial expression and recognition, affective body expression and recognition, affective speech processing, affective text and dialogue processing, recognizing affect using physiological measures, computational models of emotion and theoretical foundations, and affective sound and music processing.

This special issue is the result of the selection and re-submission of advanced and revised versions of papers from the workshop on "Trust in Agent Societies" (11th edition), held in Estoril (Portugal) on May 10, 2008 as part of the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 2008 Conference (AAMAS 2008), and organized by Rino Falcone, Suzanne Barber, Jordi Sabater-Mir, and Munindar Singh. The aim of the workshop was to bring together researchers from different fields (artificial intelligence, multi-agent systems, cognitive science, game theory, and social and organizational sciences) that could contribute to a better understanding of trust and reputation in agent societies. The workshop scope included theoretical results as well their applications in human–computer interaction and electronic commerce. It was constituted by a main session integrated with two others: the first on the formal models of trust, and the second on reputation models. In this volume we present papers from the three workshop sessions: the main s- sion with papers on theoretical and applicative aspects of trust (from a engineering, cognitive, computational, sociological point of view); the formal model session with works in the field of applied logic and applied mathematics; the reputation models session with papers that specifically address models of reputation systems, theo- driven and empirically backed-up guidelines for designing reputation technologies, and analysis and discussion of existing reputation systems.