This book describes the new generation of discrete choice methods, focusing on the many advances that are made possible by simulation. Researchers use these statistical methods to examine the choices ...that consumers, households, firms, and other agents make. Each of the major models is covered: logit, generalized extreme value, or GEV (including nested and cross-nested logits), probit, and mixed logit, plus a variety of specifications that build on these basics. Simulation-assisted estimation procedures are investigated and compared, including maximum simulated likelihood, method of simulated moments, and method of simulated scores. Procedures for drawing from densities are described, including variance reduction techniques such as anithetics and Halton draws. Recent advances in Bayesian procedures are explored, including the use of the Metropolis-Hastings algorithm and its variant Gibbs sampling. No other book incorporates all these fields, which have arisen in the past 20 years. The procedures are applicable in many fields, including energy, transportation, environmental studies, health, labor, and marketing.
This book is about preferences, principally as they figure in economics. It also explores their uses in everyday language and action, how they are understood in psychology and how they figure in ...philosophical reflection on action and morality. The book clarifies and for the most part defends the way in which economists invoke preferences to explain, predict and assess behavior and outcomes. Hausman argues, however, that the predictions and explanations economists offer rely on theories of preference formation that are in need of further development, and he criticizes attempts to define welfare in terms of preferences and to define preferences in terms of choices or self-interest. The analysis clarifies the relations between rational choice theory and philosophical accounts of human action. The book also assembles the materials out of which models of preference formation and modification can be constructed, and it comments on how reason and emotion shape preferences.
Humans have evolved to acquire the ability to read facial information in order to access information resources more quickly. People can quickly make initial judgments and establish an impression of a ...person from facial-related information alone. In the social life of adults, facial trustworthiness and facial attractiveness have an important role as important components of facial information. The effects of these two on social interaction are also seen in children, thus influencing their judgment on some decisions. Discuss the impact of facial information received by children on their choices through separate accounts of children’s facial trustworthiness and facial attractiveness on children’s preference judgments, mainly in terms of peer choice preferences and choices in gaming choices. The results of this paper are that both facial credibility and facial attractiveness affect children’s choice preferences, with high trustworthiness and high attractiveness being more likely to be preferred; and that facial trustworthiness and facial attractiveness share similar patterns and can influence each other.
As economic inequality increases in the United States and around the world, psychologists have begun to study how the psychological experience of scarcity impacts people's decision making. Recent ...work in psychology suggests that scarcity—the experience of having insufficient resources to accomplish a goal—makes people more strongly prefer what they already like relative to what they already dislike or like less. That is, scarcity may polarize preferences. One common preference is the preference for familiarity: the systematic liking of more often experienced stimuli, compared to less often experienced stimuli. Across four studies—three experiments and one cross- sectional survey (all pre-registered; see https://osf.io/7zyfr/)—we investigated whether scarcity polarizes the preference for familiarity. Despite consistently replicating people's preference for the familiar, we consistently failed to show that scarcity increased the degree to which people preferred the familiar to the unfamiliar. We discuss these results in light of recent failures to replicate famous findings in the scarcity literature.
Anti-preferences Kreitner, Roy
Theoretical inquiries in law,
07/2021, Letnik:
22, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This Article offers a critical evaluation of preference satisfaction as a frame for normative thinking. It begins with an internal critique of the way preferences work in normative economics, ...distinguishing among three elements: welfare; preferences; and choices. For preference satisfaction to work well, it must be able to bridge two gaps, one between choice and preferences, and another between preferences and welfare. In contexts where both those gaps are bridged, preference satisfaction offers a workable normative framework; where at least one of those gaps is unbridgeable, the framework should be treated with extreme caution if not jettisoned altogether. The Article then goes on to pursue an external critique, by asking what price we pay for using the preference satisfaction framework when it appears to perform well. The point of the critique is that even when preference satisfaction provides a good normative framework on its own terms, the framework obscures considerations that should not be ignored. By pursuing one concrete example, the Article shows how broad considerations regarding the implications of the regime of wage labor are absent from legal contemplation when labor law is imagined and shaped through the lens of preference satisfaction. The Article concludes with a speculation about how different theories of welfare might be employed in concert, rather than as alternatives. It suggests that a pluralism of theory is a way to expose the political stakes in the kinds of policy discussion where preference satisfaction is often a dominant way of thinking.
Does the Law Change Preferences? Arlen, Jennifer; Kornhauser, Lewis A.
Theoretical inquiries in law,
07/2021, Letnik:
22, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
“I would prefer not”
Scholars have recently challenged the claim in classical deterrence theory that law influences behavior only through the expected sanction imposed. Some go further and argue that ...law may also “shape preferences,” changing people’s wants and values. In this Article, we analyze existing claims that criminal and civil law alter preferences and conclude that none suggest that the law shapes preferences. We first clarify this preference-shaping claim by elaborating the structure of rational choice theory generally and “preference” in particular. We then investigate three mechanisms of legal influence suggested by the preference-shaping literature: (1) the “serious harm” mechanism; (2) the “social norm” mechanism; and (3) the “self-improvement” mechanism. We then show that each of these mechanisms operates by changing the agent’s beliefs about the attributes or consequences of her choice options rather than by changing her preferences.
The overriding theme of the conference honoring Bob Cooter and his work is the question whether law and policy can change people’s preferences. The conventional “law and economics” answer is “no.” ...People have preferences that are fixed. What changes in law and policy do is to change how people behave by altering the costs and benefits people face in pursuit of their preferences. Put simply, the assumption of the “law and economics” model is that people respond to financial incentives by changing how they act, not what they want. So, to take a simple example, imagine two people at the same starting point, both wanting to drive separately to visit a mutual friend. Their preference to get there promptly and safely is common to both of them, but how they act in pursuit of that goal may well differ. Moreover, government can alter how they drive to their friend’s by making changes such as putting in a freeway, or adding a new lane to the road, or installing lots of new traffic signals or stop signs along one route. The two people may have driven different routes previously, and they may alter their driving strategy in response to the policy changes government has adopted and may still decide that different routes are better for them. But they do not change their desire to see their friend in a prompt and safe manner. In this Article I offer a counterexample — an instance in which changes in law and policy can not only alter the behavior of some with fixed preferences, but also can impact the preferences of others. My example is about changes in society that can alter parenting style (of those parents with a fixed preference to have their children succeed) and can also change the underlying preferences that those children have as to how their lives should play out.
Preferential trade agreements have become common ways to protect or restrict access to national markets in products and services. The United States has signed trade agreements with almost two dozen ...countries as close as Mexico and Canada and as distant as Morocco and Australia. The European Union has done the same. In addition to addressing economic issues, these agreements also regulate the protection of human rights. InForced to Be Good, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton tells the story of the politics of such agreements and of the ways in which governments pursue market integration policies that advance their own political interests, including human rights.
How and why do global norms for social justice become international regulations linked to seemingly unrelated issues, such as trade? Hafner-Burton finds that the process has been unconventional. Efforts by human rights advocates and labor unions to spread human rights ideals, for example, do not explain why American and European governments employ preferential trade agreements to protect human rights. Instead, most of the regulations protecting human rights are codified in global moral principles and laws only because they serve policymakers' interests in accumulating power or resources or solving other problems. Otherwise, demands by moral advocates are tossed aside. And, as Hafner-Burton shows, even the inclusion of human rights protections in trade agreements is no guarantee of real change, because many of the governments that sign on to fair trade regulations oppose such protections and do not intend to force their implementation.
Ultimately, Hafner-Burton finds that, despite the difficulty of enforcing good regulations and the less-than-noble motives for including them, trade agreements that include human rights provisions have made a positive difference in the lives of some of the people they are intended-on paper, at least-to protect.
Democratizing Luxury explores the interplay between advertising
and consumption in modern Japan by investigating how Japanese
companies at key historical moments assigned value, or "luxury," to
...mass-produced products as an important business model. Japanese
name-brand luxury evolved alongside a consumer society emerging in
the late nineteenth century, with iconic companies whose names
became associated with quality and style. At the same time, Western
ideas of modernity merged with earlier artisanal ideals to create
Japanese connotations of luxury for readily accessible products.
Businesses manufactured items at all price points to increase
consumer attainability, while starkly curtailing production for
limited editions to augment desirability. Between the late
nineteenth and twenty-first centuries, control over family
disposable income transformed Japanese middle-class women into an
important market. Growth of purchasing power among women
corresponded with Japanese goods diffusing throughout the empire,
and globally after the Asia-Pacific war (1931-1945). This book
offers case studies that examine affordable luxury consumer items
often advertised to women, including drinks, beauty products,
fashion, and timepieces. Japanese companies have capitalized on
affordable luxury since a flourishing domestic mercantile economy
began in the Tokugawa period (1603-1868), showcasing brand-name
shops, renowned artisans, and mass-produced woodblock prints by
famous artists. In the late nineteenth century, personalized
service expanded within department stores like Mitsukoshi, Shiseidō
cosmetic counters, and designer boutiques. Shiseidō now globally
markets invented traditions of omotenashi, Japanese "values" of
hospitality expressed in purchasing and consuming its products. In
postwar times, when a thriving democracy and middle-class were tied
to greater disposable income and consumerism, companies rebuilt a
growing consumer base among cautious shoppers: democratizing luxury
at reasonable prices and maintaining business patterns of
accessibility, high quality, and exemplary service. Nationalism
amid economic success soon blended with myths of unique Japanese
identity in a mass consumer society, suffused by commodity
fetishism with widely available brand names. As the first
comprehensive history of iconic Japanese name brands and their
unique connotations of luxury and accessibility in modern Japan and
elsewhere, Democratizing Luxury explores company histories and
reveals strategies that lead customers to consume these alluring
commodities.
Given a set of objects Formula Omitted, each with Formula Omitted numeric attributes, a top-Formula Omitted preference scores these objects using a linear combination of their attribute values, ...where the weight on each attribute reflects the interest in this attribute. Given a query preference Formula Omitted, a top-Formula Omitted query finds the Formula Omitted objects in Formula Omitted with highest scores with respect to Formula Omitted. Given a query object Formula Omitted and a set of preferences Formula Omitted, a reverse top- Formula Omitted query finds all preferences Formula Omitted for which Formula Omitted becomes one of the top Formula Omitted objects with respect to Formula Omitted. Previous solutions to these problems are effective only in low dimensions. In this paper, we develop a solution for much higher dimensions (up to high tens), if many preferences exhibit sparsity --i.e., each specifies non-zero weights for only a handful (say Formula Omitted-Formula Omitted) of attributes (though the subsets of such attributes and their weights can vary greatly). Our idea is to select carefully a set of low-dimensional core subspaces to "cover" the sparse preferences in a workload. These subspaces allow us to index them more effectively than the full-dimensional space. Being multi-dimensional, each subspace covers many possible preferences; furthermore, multiple subspaces can jointly cover a preference, thereby expanding the coverage beyond each subspace's dimensionality. Experimental evaluation validates our solution's effectiveness and advantages over previous solutions.
![Top-[Formula Omitted] Prefe...](http://api.summon.serialssolutions.com/2.0.0/image/issn/XR4PS5YY4K/1041-4347/small "Top-[Formula Omitted] Preferences in High Dimensions")
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