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Articles 1 - 9 of 9
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Need For Diversity In Elected Decision-Making Bodies: Economics-Related Analysis, Nguyen Ngoc Thach, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Need For Diversity In Elected Decision-Making Bodies: Economics-Related Analysis, Nguyen Ngoc Thach, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
On a qualitative level, everyone understands the need to have diversity in elected decision-making bodies, so that the viewpoint of each group be properly taken into account. However, when only the usual economic criteria are used in this election -- e.g., in the election of company's board -- the resulting bodies often under-represent some groups (e.g., women). A frequent way to remedy this situation is to artificially enforce diversity instead of strictly following purely economic criteria. In this paper, we show the current seeming contradiction between economics and diversity is caused by the imperfection of the use economic models: in …
How Can Econometrics Help Fight The Covid'19 Pandemic?, Kevin Alvarez, Vladik Kreinovich
How Can Econometrics Help Fight The Covid'19 Pandemic?, Kevin Alvarez, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
The current pandemic is difficult to model -- and thus, difficult to control. In contrast to the previous epidemics whose dynamics was smooth and well described by the existing models, the statistics of the current pandemic is highly oscillating. In this paper, we show that these oscillations can be explained if we take into account the disease's long incubation period -- as a result of which our control measures are determined by outdated data, showing number of infected people two weeks ago. To better control the pandemic, we propose to use the experience of economics, where also the effect of …
Why Quadratic Log-Log Dependence Is Ubiquitous And What Next, Sean R. Aguilar, Vladik Kreinovich, Uyen Pham
Why Quadratic Log-Log Dependence Is Ubiquitous And What Next, Sean R. Aguilar, Vladik Kreinovich, Uyen Pham
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
In many real-life situations ranging from financial to volcanic data, growth is described either by a power law -- which is linear in log-log scale, or by a quadratic dependence in the log-log scale. In this paper, we use natural scale invariance requirement to explain the ubiquity of such dependencies. We also explain what should be a reasonable choice of the next model, if quadratic turns out to be not too accurate: it turns out that under scale invariance, the next class of models are cubic dependencies in the log-log scale, then fourth order dependencies, etc.
Decision Making Under Interval Uncertainty Revisited, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Uyen Pham
Decision Making Under Interval Uncertainty Revisited, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Uyen Pham
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
In many real-life situations, we do not know the exact values of the expected gain corresponding to different possible actions, we only have lower and upper bounds on these gains -- i.e., in effect, intervals of possible gain values. How can we made decisions under such interval uncertainty? In this paper, we show that natural requirements lead to a 2-parametric family of possible decision-making strategies.
Economics Of Reciprocity And Temptation, Laxman Bokati, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Ngoc Thach
Economics Of Reciprocity And Temptation, Laxman Bokati, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Nguyen Ngoc Thach
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
Behavioral economics has shown that in many situations, people's behavior differs from what is predicted by simple traditional utility-maximization economic models. It is therefore desirable to be able to accurately describe people's actual behavior. In some cases, the difference from the traditional models is caused by bounded rationality -- our limited ability to process information and to come up with a truly optimal solutions. In such cases, predicting people's behavior is difficult. In other cases, however, people actually optimize -- but the actual expression for utility is more complicated than in the traditional models. In such case, it is, in …
Commonsense Explanations Of Sparsity, Zipf Law, And Nash's Bargaining Solution, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Kittawit Autchariyapanitkul
Commonsense Explanations Of Sparsity, Zipf Law, And Nash's Bargaining Solution, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich, Kittawit Autchariyapanitkul
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
As econometric models become more and more accurate and more and more mathematically complex, they also become less and less intuitively clear and convincing. To make these models more convincing, it is desirable to supplement the corresponding mathematics with commonsense explanations. In this paper, we provide such explanation for three economics-related concepts: sparsity (as in LASSO), Zipf's Law, and Nash's bargaining solution.
How To Explain The Anchoring Formula In Behavioral Economics, Laxman Bokati, Vladik Kreinovich, Chon Van Le
How To Explain The Anchoring Formula In Behavioral Economics, Laxman Bokati, Vladik Kreinovich, Chon Van Le
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
According to the traditional economics, the price that a person is willing to pay for an item should be uniquely determined by the value that this person will get from this item, it should not depend, e.g., on the asking price proposed by the seller. In reality, the price that a person is willing to pay does depend on the asking price; this is known as the anchoring effect. In this paper, we provide a natural justification for the empirical formula that describes this effect.
Quantum (And More General) Models Of Research Collaboration, Oscar Galindo, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich
Quantum (And More General) Models Of Research Collaboration, Oscar Galindo, Miroslav Svitek, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
In the last decades, several papers have shown that quantum techniques can be successful in describing not only events in the micro-scale physical world -- for which they were originally invented -- but also in describing social phenomena, e.g., different economic processes. In our previous paper, we provide an explanation for this somewhat surprising successes. In this paper, we extend this explanation and show that quantum (and more general) techniques can also be used to model research collaboration.
Predictably (Boundedly) Rational: Examples Of Seemingly Irrational Behavior Can Be Quantitatively Explained By Bounded Rationality, Laxman Bokati, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Predictably (Boundedly) Rational: Examples Of Seemingly Irrational Behavior Can Be Quantitatively Explained By Bounded Rationality, Laxman Bokati, Olga Kosheleva, Vladik Kreinovich
Departmental Technical Reports (CS)
Traditional economics is based on the simplifying assumption that people behave perfectly rationally, that before making any decision, a person thoroughly analyzes all possible situations. In reality, we often do not have enough time to thoroughly analyze all the available information, as a result of which we make decisions of bounded rationality -- bounded by our inability to perform a thorough analysis of the situation. So, to predict human behavior, it is desirable to study how people actually make decisions. The corresponding area of economics is known as behavioral economics. It is known that many examples of seemingly irrational behavior …