Economists have heralded the formulation of the expected utility theorem as a universal method of choice under uncertainty. In their seminal paper, Stigler and Becker (Stigler & Becker, 1977) declared that “human behavior can be explained by a generalized calculus of utility-maximizing behavior” (p.76). The universality of the rational choice theory has been widely criticized by psychologists, ...

By James C. Cox and Stephen C. Hayne* Abstract Both mainstream economics and its critics have focused on models of individual rational agents even though most important decisions are made by small groups. Little systematic work has been done to study the behavior of small groups as decision-making agents in markets and other strategic games. This may limit the relevance of both economics and it...

A new method for construction of bases for general distribution spaces is developed. This method allows the freedom to prescribe the nature and properties of the basis elements. The method is deployed to the construction of bases consisting of rational functions of uniformly bounded degrees for Besov and Triebel–Lizorkin spaces of holomorphic functions in the unit disc. In turn, this is utilize...

The class of rational subsets of a group G is the smallest class that contains all finite subsets of G and that is closed with respect to union, product and taking the monoid generated by a set. The rational subset membership problem for a finitely generated group G is the decision problem, where for a given rational subset of G and a group element g it is asked whether g ∈ G. This paper presen...

We characterize pairs of complementary non-homogeneous Beatty sequences (An)n>0 and (Bn)n>0, with the restriction A1 = 1 and B1 ≥ 3, for which there exists an invariant take-away game having {(An, Bn), (Bn, An) | n > 0} ∪ {(0, 0)} as set of P -positions. Using the notion of Sturmian word arising in combinatorics on words, this characterization can be translated into a decision procedure relying...

A Salience Theory of Choice Errors We study a psychologically based foundation for choice errors. The decision maker applies a preference ranking after forming a ‘consideration set’ prior to choosing an alternative. Membership of the consideration set is determined both by the alternative specific salience and by the rationality of the agent (his general propensity to consider all alternatives)...