Preference, Belief, and Similarity


Book Description

Amos Tversky (1937–1996), a towering figure in cognitive and mathematical psychology, devoted his professional life to the study of similarity, judgment, and decision making. He had a unique ability to master the technicalities of normative ideals and then to intuit and demonstrate experimentally their systematic violation due to the vagaries and consequences of human information processing. He created new areas of study and helped transform disciplines as varied as economics, law, medicine, political science, philosophy, and statistics. This book collects forty of Tversky's articles, selected by him in collaboration with the editor during the last months of Tversky's life. It is divided into three sections: Similarity, Judgment, and Preferences. The Preferences section is subdivided into Probabilistic Models of Choice, Choice under Risk and Uncertainty, and Contingent Preferences. Included are several articles written with his frequent collaborator, Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman.




Preference, Belief, and Similarity


Book Description

Selected works by the influential cognitive and mathematical psychologist and decision theorist Amos Tversky.










Preferences and Similarities


Book Description

The fields of similarity and preference are still broadening due to the exploration of new fields of application. This is caused by the strong impact of vagueness, imprecision, uncertainty and dominance on human and agent information, communication, planning, decision, action, and control as well as by the technical progress of the information technology itself. The topics treated in this book are of interest to computer scientists, statisticians, operations researchers, experts in AI, cognitive psychologists and economists.













The Preference for Belief Consonance


Book Description

We consider the determinants and consequences of a source of utility that has received limited attention from economists: people's desire for the beliefs of other people to align with their own. We relate this 'preference for belief consonance' to a variety of other constructs that have been explored by economists, including identity, ideology, homophily and fellow-feeling. We review different possible explanations for why people care about others' beliefs and propose that the preference for belief consonance leads to a range of disparate phenomena, including motivated belief-formation, proselytizing, selective exposure to media, avoidance of conversational minefields, pluralistic ignorance, belief-driven clustering, intergroup belief polarization and conflict. We also discuss an explanation for why disputes are often so intense between groups whose beliefs are, by external observers' standards, highly similar to one-another.