Neuroscience of Preference and Choice


Book Description

One of the most pressing questions in neuroscience, psychology and economics today is how does the brain generate preferences and make choices? With a unique interdisciplinary approach, this volume is among the first to explore the cognitive and neural mechanisms mediating the generation of the preferences that guide choice. From preferences determining mundane purchases, to social preferences influencing mating choice, through to moral decisions, the authors adopt diverse approaches to answer the question. Chapters explore the instability of preferences and the common neural processes that occur across preferences. Edited by one of the world's most renowned cognitive neuroscientists, each chapter is authored by an expert in the field, with a host of international contributors. Emphasis on common process underlying preference generation makes material applicable to a variety of disciplines - neuroscience, psychology, economics, law, philosophy, etc. Offers specific focus on how preferences are generated to guide decision making, carefully examining one aspect of the broad field of neuroeconomics and complementing existing volumes Features outstanding, international scholarship, with chapters written by an expert in the topic area




Extension of Data Envelopment Analysis with Preference Information


Book Description

This book provides an introduction to incorporating preference information in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) with a special emphasis in Value Efficiency Analysis. In addition to theoretical considerations, numerous illustrative examples are included. Hence, the book can be used as a teaching text as well. Only a modest mathematical background is needed to understand the main principles. The only prerequisites are a) familiarity with linear algebra, especially matrix calculus; b) knowledge of the simplex method; and c) familiarity with the use of computer software. The book is organized as follows. Chapter 1 provides motivation and introduces the basic concepts. Chapter 2 provides the basic ideas and models of Data Envelopment Analysis. The efficient frontier and production possibility set concepts play an important role in all considerations. That's why these concepts are considered more closely in Chapter 3. Since the approaches introduced in this study are inspired by Multiple Objective Linear Programming, the basic concepts of this field are reviewed in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 also compares and contrasts Data Envelopment Analysis and Multiple Objective Linear Programming, providing some cornerstones for approaches presented later in the book. Chapter 6 discusses the traditional approaches to take into account preference information in DEA. In Chapter 7, Value Efficiency is introduced, and Chapter 8 discusses practical aspects. Some extensions are presented in Chapter 9, and in Chapter 10 Value Efficiency is extended to cover the case when a production possibility set is not convex. Three implemented applications are reviewed in Chapter 11.




The News Gap


Book Description

An analysis of divergent online news preferences of journalists and consumers and what this means for media and democracy in the digital age. The websites of major media organizations—CNN, USA Today, the Guardian, and others—provide the public with much of the online news they consume. But although a large proportion of the top stories these sites disseminate cover politics, international relations, and economics, users of these sites show a preference (as evidenced by the most viewed stories) for news about sports, crime, entertainment, and weather. In this book, Pablo Boczkowski and Eugenia Mitchelstein examine the divergence in preferences and consider its implications for the media industry and democratic life in the digital age. Drawing on analyses of more than 50,000 stories posted on twenty news sites in seven countries in North and South America and Western Europe, Boczkowski and Mitchelstein find that the gap in news preferences exists regardless of ideological orientation or national media culture, and that it is not affected by innovations in forms of storytelling, such as blogs and user-generated content on mainstream news sites. Drawing upon these findings, they explore the news gap's troubling consequences for the matrix that connects communication, technology, and politics in the digital age.




Fuzzy Preference Ordering of Interval Numbers in Decision Problems


Book Description

In conventional mathematical programming, coefficients of problems are usually determined by the experts as crisp values in terms of classical mathematical reasoning. But in reality, in an imprecise and uncertain environment, it will be utmost unrealistic to assume that the knowledge and representation of an expert can come in a precise way. The wider objective of the book is to study different real decision situations where problems are defined in inexact environment. Inexactness are mainly generated in two ways – (1) due to imprecise perception and knowledge of the human expert followed by vague representation of knowledge as a DM; (2) due to huge-ness and complexity of relations and data structure in the definition of the problem situation. We use interval numbers to specify inexact or imprecise or uncertain data. Consequently, the study of a decision problem requires answering the following initial questions: How should we compare and define preference ordering between two intervals?, interpret and deal inequality relations involving interval coefficients?, interpret and make way towards the goal of the decision problem? The present research work consists of two closely related fields: approaches towards defining a generalized preference ordering scheme for interval attributes and approaches to deal with some issues having application potential in many areas of decision making.




Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics


Book Description

Since so few people appear knowledgeable about public affairs, one might question whether collective policy preferences revealed in opinion surveys accurately convey the distribution of voices and interests in a society. This study, the first comprehensive treatment of the relationship between knowledge, representation, and political equality in opinion surveys, suggests some surprising answers. Knowledge does matter, and the way it is distributed in society can cause collective preferences to reflect disproportionately the opinions of some groups more than others. Sometimes collective preferences seem to represent something like the will of the people, but frequently they do not. Sometimes they rigidly enforce political equality in the expression of political viewpoints, but often they do not. The primary culprit is not any inherent shortcoming in the methods of survey research. Rather, it is the limited degree of knowledge held by ordinary citizens about public affairs. Accounting for these factors can help survey researchers, journalists, politicians, and concerned citizens better appreciate the pitfalls and possibilities for using opinion polls to represent the people s voice.




Preference Learning


Book Description

The topic of preferences is a new branch of machine learning and data mining, and it has attracted considerable attention in artificial intelligence research in previous years. It involves learning from observations that reveal information about the preferences of an individual or a class of individuals. Representing and processing knowledge in terms of preferences is appealing as it allows one to specify desires in a declarative way, to combine qualitative and quantitative modes of reasoning, and to deal with inconsistencies and exceptions in a flexible manner. And, generalizing beyond training data, models thus learned may be used for preference prediction. This is the first book dedicated to this topic, and the treatment is comprehensive. The editors first offer a thorough introduction, including a systematic categorization according to learning task and learning technique, along with a unified notation. The first half of the book is organized into parts on label ranking, instance ranking, and object ranking; while the second half is organized into parts on applications of preference learning in multiattribute domains, information retrieval, and recommender systems. The book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in artificial intelligence, in particular machine learning and data mining, and in fields such as multicriteria decision-making and operations research.




Recent Developments in Individual and Organizational Adoption of ICTs


Book Description

In recent years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have gained significant importance and become vital to the operations of both organizations and individuals. However, there are numerous factors that have affected the adoption of ICTs including access and accessibility barriers, political participation, and social empowerment. This has attracted the attention of researchers who are interested in understanding the socioeconomic influences of ICT adoption and how these technologies impact the infrastructure of modern organizational activities. Recent Developments in Individual and Organizational Adoption of ICTs is a collection of innovative research on the methods of organizational and infrastructural advancement through the application of information and communication technologies. While highlighting topics including internet banking, supply chain management, and e-government services, this book is ideally designed for managers, researchers, policymakers, politicians, business practitioners, educators, decision scientists, strategists, and students seeking current research on the socioeconomic impact of ICT adoption.




Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems


Book Description

The four volume set LNAI 3681, LNAI 3682, LNAI 3683, and LNAI 3684 constitute the refereed proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2005, held in Melbourne, Australia in September 2005. The 716 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from nearly 1400 submissions. The papers present a wealth of original research results from the field of intelligent information processing in the broadest sense; topics covered in the fourth volume are innovations in intelligent systems and their applications, data mining and soft computing applications, skill acquisition and ubiquitous human computer interaction, soft computing and their applications, agent-based workflows, knowledge sharing and reuse, multi-media authentication and watermarking applications, knowledge and engineering techniques for spatio-temporal applications, intelligent data analysis and applications, creativitiy support environment and its social applications, collective intelligence, computational methods for intelligent neuro-fuzzy applications, evolutionary and self-organizing sensors, actuators and processing hardware, knowledge based systems for e-business and e-learning, multi-agent systems and evolutionary computing, ubiquitous pattern recognition, neural networks for data mining, and knowledge-based technology in crime matching, modelling and prediction.




Choice, Preference, and Disability


Book Description

This book examines choice and preference in the lives of people with disability, focusing on people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It provides an overview of choice and examines foundational concepts related to choice and preference, including self-determination and supported decision making. Chapters examine a range of critical service and policy issues, such as guardianship, individualized funding, the health care system, and the situation regarding choices for people with disability in international contexts. In addition, chapters explore issues ranging from the development of preference and choice in childhood to choices in older age and end of life matters. It provides in-depth analysis of particular choices faced at different points across the lifespan. The book concludes with implications for policy and practice. Topics featured in this book include: Supported decision making for adults with intellectual disabilities or acquired brain injury. The role of parents and families in the development of choice-making skills. Preference assessments for individuals who cannot tell us what they prefer. Employment opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities. Sexual and reproductive rights for people with intellectual disabilities. Disability and the choice to become a parent. Choice, Preference, and Disability is an essential resource for researchers, professors, clinicians, therapists, and other professionals as well as graduate students in the fields of developmental and positive psychology, rehabilitation, social work, special education, occupational, speech and language therapy, public health, and healthcare policy.




Collective Preference and Choice


Book Description

A study of the classical aggregation problems that arise in social choice theory, voting theory, and group decision-making under uncertainty.