Vinyl: Creating Meaning in an Uncertain World

Policies for an Uncertain World

Defining fitness in an uncertain world

The recently elucidated definition of fitness employed by Fisher in his fundamental theorem of natural selection is combined with reproductive values as appropriately defined in the context of both random environments and continuing fluctuations in the distribution over classes in a class-structured population. We obtain astonishingly simple results, generalisations of the Price Equation and th...

Economic Reliability Forecasting in an Uncertain World

Substantial work has applied stochastic techniques to network reliability models. These techniques can estimate risk, variance and uncertainty values. Unfortunately, these models do not address the issues of revenues, return on investment, or the time-value of money. To address these issues, we have developed an Economic Reliability Analysis [ERA] framework at the University of Virginia that fu...

Imperfect Data in an Uncertain World

Bayesian analysis and modeling, in which uncertainties are quantified in terms of probability, offers an alternative approach to understanding in meteorological applications. The underlying principle, practiced in fields like archaeology and geology, is the accumulation of evidence. The approach provides a mathematical rule to update existing beliefs in light of new evidence. It requires the da...

Learning and Disagreement in an Uncertain World∗

Most economic analyses presume that there are limited differences in the prior beliefs of individuals, an assumption most often justified by the argument that sufficient common experiences and observations will eliminate disagreements. We investigate this claim using a simple model of Bayesian learning. Two individuals with different priors observe the same infinite sequence of signals about so...