Decision Sciences

Integration of APECS and VE-Suite for Data Overlay

by Gerrick Bivins

Prosocial behavior and incentives: Evidence from field experiments in rural Mexico and Tanzania

by Rohit Jindal

Published in Ecological Economics.
Co-authored with John Kerr and Mamta Vardhan.

Incentive-based schemes for natural resource conservation are based on the premise that offering payments to groups of... more Incentive-based schemes for natural resource conservation are based on the premise that offering payments to groups of land users will motivate them to organize collectively to provide environmental services. In contrast, research from behavioral economics shows that introducing monetary incentives can undermine collective action that is motivated by social norms. In such a case payment could have perverse impacts. In view of this dichotomy, we conducted choice and field experiments in rural Mexico and Tanzania to test the response of prosocial behavior to incentives. The field experiments involved voluntary participation in real communal tasks under different incentive structures. Findings suggest that payments help raise participation where people are otherwise uninterested, but that participation in communal tasks can be high irrespective of the incentive if social norms favoring participation are present. In Tanzania, high individual payments do not undermine participation although they appear to reduce people's satisfaction from the task relative to when there is no payment. In Mexico, group payments made through village authorities yield lower participation where people distrust leaders. Challenges to conducting field experiments in our research settings limit what we can conclude from our work, but the findings raise important points and suggest areas for further research.

Moral Reasoning Under Uncertainty

by The Anh Han

co-authored with A. Saptawijaya and L. M. Pereira.
In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Logic for Programming Artificial Intelligence and Reasoning (LPAR 2012), Springer LNAI, 2012

We present a Logic Programming framework for moral reasoning under uncertainty. It is enacted by a coherent... more We present a Logic Programming framework for moral reasoning under uncertainty. It is enacted by a coherent combination of our two previously implemented systems, Evolution Prospection for decision making, and P-log for probabilistic inference. It allows computing available moral judgments via distinct kinds of prior and post preferences. In introducing various aspects of uncertainty into cases of classical trolley problem moral dilemmas, we show how they may appropriately influence moral judgments, allowing decision makers to opt for different choices, and for these to be externally appraised, even when subject to incomplete evidence, as in courts.

Evolution prospection in decision making

by The Anh Han

co-authored with LM Pereira, Journal of Intelligent Decision Making, 2009

This work concerns the problem of modelling evolving prospective agent systems. Inasmuch a prospective agent [1] looks... more This work concerns the problem of modelling evolving prospective agent systems. Inasmuch a prospective agent [1] looks ahead a number of steps into the future, it is confronted with the problem of having several different possible courses of evolution, and therefore needs to be able to prefer amongst them to decide the best to follow as seen from its present state. First it needs a priori preferences for the generation of likely courses of evolution. Subsequently, this being one main contribution of this paper, based on the historical information as well as on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative a posteriori evaluation of its possible evolutions, we equip our agent with so-called evolution-level preferences mechanism, involving three distinct types of commitment. In addition, one other main contribution, to enable such a prospective agent to evolve, we provide a way for modelling its evolving knowledge base, including environment and course of evolution triggering of all active goals (desires), context-sensitive preferences and integrity constraints. We exhibit several examples to illustrate the proposed concepts.

Visualizable and Explicable Recommendations Obtained from Price Estimation Functions

by Claudia Becerra

Paper co-authored with Fabio Gonzalez and Alexander Gelbukh presented in RecSys'11 workshop on human decision making in recommender systems published on proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Recommender systems, ACM New York, NY, USA ©2011, ISBN: 978-1-4503-0683-6 doi>10.1145/2043932.2044017

Collaborative filtering is one of the most common approaches in many current recommender systems. However, historical... more Collaborative filtering is one of the most common approaches in many current recommender systems. However, historical data and customer profileles, necessary for this approach, are not always available. Similarly, new products are constantly launched to the market lacking historical information. We propose a new method to deal with these "cold start" scenarios, designing price-estimation functions used for making recommendations based on cost-benefit analysis. Experimental results, using a data set of 836 laptop descriptions, showed that such price-estimation functions can be learned from data. Besides, they can also be used to formulate interpretable recommendations that explain to users how product features determine its price. Finally a 2D visualization of the proposed recommender system was provided.

Value of information in portfolio decision analysis

by Jeffrey Keisler

Ranking of Strategic Plans in Balanced Scorecard by Using Electre Method

by Javad Dodangeh

In a growing competitive business environment, many organizations have taken by adoption the strategic planning... more In a growing competitive business environment, many organizations have taken by adoption the strategic planning approach to an effort for business excellence. Implementation of proper strategies plays a vital role for organizations' success. Balanced scorecard is a suitable tool for designing operational strategies. However, one of the balanced scorecard problems is the selection in strategic plans' performance. In this paper, was settled a model for selection of strategic plans in Balanced Scorecard using Electre method. So first using the consensus of organization's managers and experts' opinions, measures of four perspectives and general objectives are determined in BSC. And then using experts' opinions and taking the relative importance of decision makers' opinions into consideration, by using Electre1, the performances of strategic plans are selected in BSC model. The results are shown that the introduced method is more reliable and acceptable and the experts were verified the model for selecting of strategic plans in BSC in operation. The introduced method was used in a study and extracted results from it were analyzed from different points of view. In this article Initiative is called strategic plans.

Keywords: Balanced Scorecard, Initiatives, MCDM, ELECTRE

Dominance Testing Via Model Checking

by Vasant Honavar

Santhanam, G., Basu, S., and Honavar, V. (2010). Dominance Testing Via Model Checking. In: Proceedings of the 24th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-10). pp. 357-362. AAAI Press.

Efficient Dominance Testing for Unconditional Preferences

by Vasant Honavar

Santhanam, G., Basu, S., and Honavar, V. (2010). Efficient Dominance Testing for Unconditional Preferences. In: Proceedings of the Twelfth International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR 2010). pp. 590-592. AAAI Press.

We study a dominance relation for comparing outcomes based on unconditional qualitative preferences and compare it... more We study a dominance relation for comparing outcomes based on unconditional qualitative preferences and compare it with its unconditional counterparts for TCP-nets and their variants. Dominance testing based on this relation can be car- ried out in polynomial time by evaluating the satisfiability of a logic formula.

In Defense of Gut Feelings: Rhetorics of Decision-Making

by Nathaniel Rivers

Present Tense: A Journal of Rhetoric in Society 1.2 (2011).

This article borrows Carolyn Miller’s critique of decision science to both chart the (still present) dangers of... more This article borrows Carolyn Miller’s critique of decision science to both chart the (still present) dangers of motivism (a term Wayne Booth uses to describe the failure to reason about values) and the reduction of action to knowledge (e.g., from should to can) in public life and to cultivate a response to decision science from within rhetoric’s pedagogy. If decision science is indeed influential, and Miller and contemporary manifestations argue that it is, then how might rhetorical studies create a counter-influence through education? After elaborating Miller’s critique and demonstrating decision science’s contemporary presence, the article forwards a rhetorical pedagogical response drawing on research in gut feelings.

An effective Markov based approach for calculating the Limit Matrix in the Analytic Network Process

by Konstantinos KIRYTOPOULOS

Can science tell us what's objectively true?

by Brian Earp

Earp, B. D. (2011). Can science tell us what’s objectively true? The New Collection, Vol. 6., No. 1, 1-9. Featured article in the graduate journal of New College, Oxford.

Can science tell us what’s objectively true? Or is it merely a clever way to cure doubt – to give us something to... more Can science tell us what’s objectively true? Or is it merely a clever way to cure doubt – to give us something to believe in, whether it’s true or not? In this essay, I look at the pragmatist account of science expounded by Charles Sanders Peirce in his 1877 essay, ‘The Fixation of Belief’. Against Peirce, I argue that science does not come naturally to our species, nor does the doubting open-mindedness upon which its practice relies. To the extent that science is successful in ‘curing’ doubt, it’s because it tracks the real state of the world; and I argue that Peirce himself – his pragmatist narrative notwithstanding – is implicitly committed to this view as well.

The potential for the evolution of cooperation among web agents

by Cristina Bicchieri

Co-authored with Martha Pollack, Carlo Rovelli and Ioannis Tsamardinos. Published in  IInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies 48: 9-29,  1998.

Counterfactuals, Belief Changes, and Equilibrium Refinements

by Cristina Bicchieri

Published in Philosophical Topics, vol. 21. n.1, 1993

Self-refuting theories of strategic interaction: a paradox of common knowledge

by Cristina Bicchieri

Published in Erkenntnis 30, 1989: 69-85.

Strategic behavior and counterfactuals

by Cristina Bicchieri

Published in Synthese 76, 1988

The difficulty of defining rational behavior in game situations is
that the players' strategies will depend on... more The difficulty of defining rational behavior in game situations is
that the players' strategies will depend on their expectations about other players' strategies. These expectations are beliefs the players come to the game with. Game theorists assume these beliefs to be rational in the very special sense of being objectively correct but no explanation is offered of the mechanism generating this property of the belief system. In many interesting cases, however, such a rationality requirement is not enough to guarantee that an equilibrium will be attained. In particular, I analyze the case of multiple equilibria, since in this case there exists a whole set of rational beliefs, so that no player can ever be certain that the others believe he has certain beliefs. In this case it becomes necessary to explicitly model the process of belief formation. This model attributes to the players a theory of counterfactuals which they use in restricting the set of possible equilibria. If it were possible to attribute to the players the same theory of counterfactuals, then the players' beliefs would eventually converge.

Risk Control after Root Cause Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review

by Alan Card

Card AJ, Ward JR, Clarkson PJ. Risk Control after Root Cause Analysis: A Systematic Literature Review. Proceedings of the International Conference on Healthcare Systems Ergonomics and Patient Safety. Oviedo, Spain. June 22-24 2011. ISBN: 9780415684132

See the full paper based on this work:

Card AJ, Ward J, Clarkson PJ. Successful risk assessment may not... more See the full paper based on this work:

Card AJ, Ward J, Clarkson PJ. Successful risk assessment may not always lead to successful risk control: A systematic literature review of risk control after root cause analysis. J Healthc Risk Manag. 2012;31(3):6-12. doi: 10.1002/jhrm.20090. PubMed PMID: 22359258.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/jhrm.20090/abstract

The full text of the pre-submission draft can be found here:

http://cambridge.academia.edu/AlanCard/Papers/1135307/Successful_Risk_Assessment_May_Not_Always_Lead_To_Successful_Risk_Control_A_Systematic_Literature_Review_of_Risk_Control_after_Root_Cause_Analysis

Product pricing using TOC principles: An application to steel furniture manufacture

by Sudhakar Achath

Applications of the Fourier transform

by Sudhakar Achath

An analytical and numerical method for solving adaptive control models which include forward looking variables

by Sudhakar Achath