Social Choice and Strategic Decisions

Social Choice and Strategic Decisions PDF Author: David Austen-Smith
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 354027295X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
Social choices, about expenditures on government programs, or about public policy more broadly, or indeed from any conceivable set of alternatives, are determined by politics. This book is a collection of essays that tie together the fields spanned by Jeffrey S. Banks' research on this subject. It examines the strategic aspects of political decision-making, including the choices of voters in committees, the positioning of candidates in electoral campaigns, and the behavior of parties in legislatures. The chapters of this book contribute to the theory of voting with incomplete information, to the literature on Downsian and probabilistic voting models of elections, to the theory of social choice in distributive environments, and to the theory of optimal dynamic decision-making. The essays employ a spectrum of research methods, from game-theoretic analysis, to empirical investigation, to experimental testing.

Essays on Economic Decisions Under Uncertainty

Essays on Economic Decisions Under Uncertainty PDF Author: Jacques Drèze
Publisher: CUP Archive
ISBN: 9780521386975
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 460

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Book Description
Professor Dreze is a highly respected mathematical economist and econometrician. This book brings together some of his major contributions to the economic theory of decision making under uncertainty, and also several essays. These include an important essay on 'Decision theory under moral hazard and state dependent preferences' that significantly extends modern theory, and which provides rigorous foundations for subsequent chapters. Topics covered within the theory include decision theory, market allocation and prices, consumer decisions, theory of the firm, labour contracts, and public decisions.

Essays in Economic Decision Making

Essays in Economic Decision Making PDF Author: Noam Tanner
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Social and Economic Factors in Decision Making under Uncertainty

Social and Economic Factors in Decision Making under Uncertainty PDF Author: Kinga Posadzy
Publisher: Linköping University Electronic Press
ISBN: 9176854213
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 16

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Book Description
The objective of this thesis is to improve the understanding of human behavior that goes beyond monetary rewards. In particular, it investigates social influences in individual’s decision making in situations that involve coordination, competition, and deciding for others. Further, it compares how monetary and social outcomes are perceived. The common theme of all studies is uncertainty. The first four essays study individual decisions that have uncertain consequences, be it due to the actions of others or chance. The last essay, in turn, uses the advances in research on decision making under uncertainty to predict behavior in riskless choices. The first essay, Fairness Versus Efficiency: How Procedural Fairness Concerns Affect Coordination, investigates whether preferences for fair rules undermine the efficiency of coordination mechanisms that put some individuals at a disadvantage. The results from a laboratory experiment show that the existence of coordination mechanisms, such as action recommendations, increases efficiency, even if one party is strongly disadvantaged by the mechanism. Further, it is demonstrated that while individuals’ behavior does not depend on the fairness of the coordination mechanism, their beliefs about people’s behavior do. The second essay, Dishonesty and Competition. Evidence from a stiff competition environment, explores whether and how the possibility to behave dishonestly affects the willingness to compete and who the winner is in a competition between similarly skilled individuals. We do not find differences in competition entry between competitions in which dishonesty is possible and in which it is not. However, we find that due to the heterogeneity in propensity to behave dishonestly, around 20% of winners are not the best-performing individuals. This implies that the efficient allocation of resources cannot be ensured in a stiff competition in which behavior is unmonitored. The third essay, Tracing Risky Decision Making for Oneself and Others: The Role of Intuition and Deliberation, explores how individuals make choices under risk for themselves and on behalf of other people. The findings demonstrate that while there are no differences in preferences for taking risks when deciding for oneself and for others, individuals have greater decision error when choosing for other individuals. The differences in the decision error can be partly attributed to the differences in information processing; individuals employ more deliberative cognitive processing when deciding for themselves than when deciding for others. Conducting more information processing when deciding for others is related to the reduction in decision error. The fourth essay, The Effect of Decision Fatigue on Surgeons’ Clinical Decision Making, investigates how mental depletion, caused by a long session of decision making, affects surgeon’s decision to operate. Exploiting a natural experiment, we find that surgeons are less likely to schedule an operation for patients who have appointment late during the work shift than for patients who have appointment at the beginning of the work shift. Understanding how the quality of medical decisions depends on when the patient is seen is important for achieving both efficiency and fairness in health care, where long shifts are popular. The fifth essay, Preferences for Outcome Editing in Monetary and Social Contexts, compares whether individuals use the same rules for mental representation of monetary outcomes (e.g., purchases, expenses) as for social outcomes (e.g., having nice time with friends). Outcome editing is an operation in mental accounting that determines whether individuals prefer to first combine multiple outcomes before their evaluation (integration) or evaluate each outcome separately (segregation). I find that the majority of individuals express different preferences for outcome editing in the monetary context than in the social context. Further, while the results on the editing of monetary outcomes are consistent with theoretical predictions, no existing model can explain the editing of social outcomes.

Essays on Economic Decision Making

Essays on Economic Decision Making PDF Author: Mahmut Kemal Ozbek
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three chapters with the common ground of economic decision making, a subject which is at the heart of Economics. In the first chapter, entitled "Decision Making with Rational Inattention", I and Maximilian Mihm study an axiomatic model of decision making with costly information processing. In this regard, we first provide a set of intuitive axioms for a decision maker's preferences over menus of acts from which she eventually makes a choice of an act. We then show that these preferences can be represented by a novel information acquisition model where choices of acts can be improved by using costly information. Our focus on preferences over menus allows us to uniquely identify the parameter's of the model from choice data: a utility function, a prior belief and an information cost function. The cost function, in particular, is compatible with the Blackwell order. Moreover, the model establishes an axiomatic foundation for the models of rational inattention which are widely applied in the literature. In the second chapter, entitled "On Representation of Monotonic Preference Orders", I and Tapan Mitra investigate the relation between scalar continuity and representability of monotone preference orders in a sequence space. Scalar continuity is shown to be sufficient for representability of a monotone preference order and easy to verify in concrete examples. Generalizing this result, we show that a condition, which restricts the extent of scalar discontinuity of a monotone preference order, ensures representability. We also relate this condition to the well-known order dense property, which is both necessary and sufficient for representability. In the third chapter, entitled "Rational Inattention and Choice of Optimal Information", I study the choice problem of a rationally inattentive decision maker modeled according to the first chapter of this dissertation. In this work, I give a characterization for optimal information choices when the cost function is linear. In addition, the characterization result is applied on a simple buyer-seller model where the buyer is rationally inattentive to the riskiness of the seller. It is found that the optimal price should be non-monotonic in the degree of the buyer's attentiveness.

Essays on Economic Decision Making

Essays on Economic Decision Making PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Decision making
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on Economic Decision Making

Essays on Economic Decision Making PDF Author: Hee Chun Kim
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 126

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Book Description
My dissertation consists of three chapters and I take different approach in each chapter to investigate economic decision making behavior. The first chapter analyzes individuals' strategic decisionmaking when players have replaceable identities and private information in a repeated prisoner's dillmma game. The second chapter studies individuals' non-strategic decision making when she has incomplete information about her underlying preference in a sequential choice situation. The third chapter experimentally examines a link between an individual's strategic thinking and nonstrategic decision making in a setting designed to elicit beliefs about independent random variables. In the first chapter, I focus on strategic decision making of economic agents when they are replaceable in a repeated prisoners dilemma. I assume that agents have different private information that restricts their set of actions, and that replacement of agent involves change of such private information. In this environment, some agents are required to signal their own private information to induce their opponents cooperative response, which may induce Pareto improvement of their expected continuation payoffs. Except for a trivial equilibrium, we can have non-trivial equilibria supporting cooperative action as a part of the equilibrium play; however, different from the environment with two long-run agents, replaceable agents environment puts a restriction on an existence of the equilibrium in which agents share the risk of type uncertainty equally regardless of the past history. Because of replacement, agents can avoid a full cost of signaling by shifting it to their successor upon their own replacement. As replacement incurs such a situation with a strictly positive probability, the equilibrium cannot avoid failure. In the second chapter I focus on an economic agent's optimal decision making in a non-strategic environment. Especially, I study a sequential choice problem where an agent's preferences evolve over time. I assume that an agent has an underlying preference, and she learns about her underlying preference depending on her choice histories. Given that an agent makes an optimal decision upon her current available menu, I characterize the sequential choice behavior that follows a Sequential Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference (WARP-S). Using this characterization, I provide criteria for sequential choice data that recovers agents underlying preference. In the third chapter I and my co-author, Duk-Gyoo Kim, focus on a link between an optimal decision making in a non-strategic environment and strategic environment. Our research investigates whether an individual decision maker follows own subjective optimization in a non-strategic decision making, and such a difference in subjective optimization is correlated with strategic decision making pattern. We conducted two separate sessions in the same subject. Each session is designed to identify subjects' behavioral pattern in strategic and non-strategic decision making environment respectively. From the data, we observed that subjects behavioral pattern shows significant similarity in two sessions.

Essays on Economic Decisions Under Uncertainty

Essays on Economic Decisions Under Uncertainty PDF Author: Jacques H. Drèze
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Essays on Economic Decisions Under Uncertainty

Essays on Economic Decisions Under Uncertainty PDF Author: Jacques H. Dreze
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Essays on socio-economic decision-making

Essays on socio-economic decision-making PDF Author: Urmimala Sen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Three Correlated Essays on the Neural Foundations of Economic Decision-making

Three Correlated Essays on the Neural Foundations of Economic Decision-making PDF Author: Ming Hsu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic dissertations
Languages : en
Pages : 270

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Book Description