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Articles 1 - 11 of 11
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Aggregating Moral Preferences, Matthew D. Adler
Aggregating Moral Preferences, Matthew D. Adler
Faculty Scholarship
Preference-aggregation problems arise in various contexts. One such context, little explored by social choice theorists, is metaethical. “Ideal-advisor” accounts, which have played a major role in metaethics, propose that moral facts are constituted by the idealized preferences of a community of advisors. Such accounts give rise to a preference-aggregation problem: namely, aggregating the advisors’ moral preferences. Do we have reason to believe that the advisors, albeit idealized, can still diverge in their rankings of a given set of alternatives? If so, what are the moral facts (in particular, the comparative moral goodness of the alternatives) when the advisors do diverge? …
Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Nashbots: How Political Scientists Have Underestimated Human Rationality, And How To Fix It, Daniel Enemark, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
Political scientists use experiments to test the predictions of game-theoretic models. In a typical experiment, each subject makes choices that determine her own earnings and the earnings of other subjects, with payments corresponding to the utility payoffs of a theoretical game. But social preferences distort the correspondence between a subject’s cash earnings and her subjective utility, and since social preferences vary, anonymously matched subjects cannot know their opponents’ preferences between outcomes, turning many laboratory tasks into games of incomplete information. We reduce the distortion of social preferences by pitting subjects against algorithmic agents (“Nashbots”). Across 11 experimental tasks, subjects facing …
Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Against Game Theory, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
People make choices. Often, the outcome depends on choices other people make. What mental steps do people go through when making such choices? Game theory, the most influential model of choice in economics and the social sciences, offers an answer, one based on games of strategy such as chess and checkers: the chooser considers the choices that others will make and makes a choice that will lead to a better outcome for the chooser, given all those choices by other people. It is universally established in the social sciences that classical game theory (even when heavily modified) is bad at …
Risk Preferences And Prenatal Exposure To Sex Hormones For Ladinos, Diego Aycinena, Rimvydas Baltaduonis, Lucas Rentschler
Risk Preferences And Prenatal Exposure To Sex Hormones For Ladinos, Diego Aycinena, Rimvydas Baltaduonis, Lucas Rentschler
Economics Faculty Publications
Risk preferences drive much of human decision making including investment, career and health choices and many more. Thus, understanding the determinants of risk preferences refines our understanding of choice in a broad array of environments. We assess the relationship between risk preferences, prenatal exposure to sex hormones and gender for a sample of Ladinos, which is an ethnic group comprising 62.86% of the population of Guatemala. Prenatal exposure to sex hormones has organizational effects on brain development, and has been shown to partially explain risk preferences for Caucasians. We measure prenatal exposure to sex hormones using the ratio of the …
New Operations Over Interval Valued Intuitionistic Hesitant Fuzzy Set, Florentin Smarandache, Said Broumi
New Operations Over Interval Valued Intuitionistic Hesitant Fuzzy Set, Florentin Smarandache, Said Broumi
Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications
Hesitancy is the most common problem in decision making, for which hesitant fuzzy set can be considered as a useful tool allowing several possible degrees of membership of an element to a set. Recently, another suitable means were defined by Zhiming Zhang [1], called interval valued intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy sets, dealing with uncertainty and vagueness, and which is more powerful than the hesitant fuzzy sets. In this paper, four new operations are introduced on interval-valued intuitionistic hesitant fuzzy sets and several important properties are also studied.
Extended Preferences And Interpersonal Comparisons: A New Account, Matthew D. Adler
Extended Preferences And Interpersonal Comparisons: A New Account, Matthew D. Adler
Faculty Scholarship
No abstract provided.
Are Individuals Fickle-Minded?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Are Individuals Fickle-Minded?, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
Game theory has been used to model large-scale social events — such as constitutional law, democratic stability, standard setting, gender roles, social movements, communication, markets, the selection of officials by means of elections, coalition formation, resource allocation, distribution of goods, and war — as the aggregate result of individual choices in interdependent decision-making. Game theory in this way assumes methodological individualism. The widespread observation that game theory predictions do not in general match observation has led to many attempts to repair game theory by creating behavioral game theory, which adds corrective terms to the game theoretic predictions in the hope …
Putting The Trial Penalty On Trial, David S. Abrams
Putting The Trial Penalty On Trial, David S. Abrams
All Faculty Scholarship
The "trial penalty" is a concept widely accepted by all the major actors in the criminal justice system: defendants, prosecutors, defense attorneys, court employees, and judges. The notion is that defendants receive longer sentences at trial than they would have through plea bargain, often substantially longer. The concept is intuitive: longer sentences are necessary in order to induce settlements and without a high settlement rate it would be impossible for courts as currently structured to sustain their immense caseload. While intuitively appealing, this view of the trial penalty is completely at odds with economic prediction. Since both prosecutors and defendants …
Can We Build Behavioral Game Theory?, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Can We Build Behavioral Game Theory?, Gale M. Lucas, Mathew D. Mccubbins, Mark Turner
Faculty Scholarship
The way economists and other social scientists model how people make interdependent decisions is through the theory of games. Psychologists and behavioral economists, however, have established many deviations from the predictions of game theory. In response to these findings, a broad movement has arisen to salvage the core of game theory. Extant models of interdependent decision-making try to improve their explanatory domain by adding some corrective terms or limits. We will make the argument that this approach is misguided. For this approach to work, the deviations would have to be consistent. Drawing in part on our experimental results, we will …
Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is: A Commitment Contract For Smoking Cessation, Xavier Giné, Dean Karlan, Jonathan Zinman
Put Your Money Where Your Butt Is: A Commitment Contract For Smoking Cessation, Xavier Giné, Dean Karlan, Jonathan Zinman
Dartmouth Scholarship
We designed and tested a voluntary commitment product to help smokers quit smoking. The product (CARES) offered smokers a savings account in which they deposit funds for six months, after which they take a urine test for nicotine and cotinine. If they pass, their money is returned; otherwise, their money is forfeited to charity. Of smokers offered CARES, 11 percent took up, and smokers randomly offered CARES were 3 percentage points more likely to pass the 6-month test than the control group. More importantly, this effect persisted in surprise tests at 12 months, indicating that CARES produced lasting smoking cessation. …
Profit Maximization Versus Disadvantageous Inequality: The Impact Of Self-Categorization, Stephen M. Garcia, Avishalom Tor, Max H. Bazerman, Dale T. Miller
Profit Maximization Versus Disadvantageous Inequality: The Impact Of Self-Categorization, Stephen M. Garcia, Avishalom Tor, Max H. Bazerman, Dale T. Miller
Journal Articles
Choice behavior researchers (e.g., Bazerman, Loewenstein, & White, 1992) have found that individuals tend to choose a more lucrative but disadvantageously unequal payoff (e.g., self—$600/other—$800) over a less profitable but equal one (e.g., self—$500/other—$500); greater profit trumps interpersonal social comparison concerns in the choice setting. We suggest, however, that self-categorization (e.g., Hogg, 2000) can shift interpersonal social comparison concerns to the intergroup level and make trading disadvantageous inequality for greater profit more difficult. Studies 1–3 show that profit maximization diminishes when recipients belong to different social categories (e.g., genders, universities). Study 2 further implicates self-categorization, as selfcategorized individuals tend to …