Social choice theory is concerned with the evaluation of alternative methods of collective decision-making, as well as with the logical foundations of welfare economics. In turn, welfare economics is concerned with the critical scrutiny of the performance of actual and/or imaginary economic systems, as well as with the critique, design and implementation of alternative economic policies. The Ha...

The models Feldstein and Rothschild, on the hand, and Jorgenson on the other adopted in 1974 to highlight the replacement ratio are identical. Yet, the authors reached opposite conclusions and that view prevailed, which is weaker in terms of theoretical and empirical foundations. This paper argues that both puzzles may be resolved by reference to the differences in the methodological preconcept...

We consider an on-line decision-theoretic interpreter and incremental execution of Golog programs. We introduce two new search control operators and demonstrate in an example how one of them can be used to save computational efforts. In addition to sensing actions designed to identify outcomes of stochastic actions, we consider a new representation for sensing actions that may return both binar...

We consider an on-line decision-theoretic interpreter and incremental execution of Golog programs. This new interpreter is intended to overcome some limitations of the off-line interpreter proposed in [Boutilier et al., 2000]. We introduce two new search control operators that can be mentioned in Golog programs: the on-line interpreter takes advantage of one of them to save computational effort...

An historical overview of experimental economics points out significant analogies between its origins and the contemporary emergence of game theory. In both cases, their effective introduction in economics was postponed until the 1960s. Such a delay cannot be ascribed to the supposed division between empirical and theoretical work but to the fact that in the 1950s experimental methodologies, su...

In industrial applications arises the need for a high level cognition system to guide mobile robots robustly. This article addresses an integrated solution to achieve this task. The proposed system exhibits robust tracking of a visual guide and provides an adaptive interaction, which maintains the stability of the overall system against fluctuations of internal or external system parameters. Mo...

Instrumental (or operant) conditioning, a form of animal learning, is similar to reinforcement learning in that it allows an agent to adapt its actions to gain maximally from the environment while only being rewarded for correct performance. But animals learn much more complicated behaviors through instrumental conditioning than robots presently acquire through reinforcement learning. We descri...

Herbert Simon made overlapping substantive contributions to the fields of economics, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, decision theory, and organization theory. Simon s work was motivated by the belief that neither the human mind, human thinking and decision making, nor human creativity need be mysterious. It was after he helped create ‘‘thinking’’ machines that Simon came...

Perspectives from the Happiness Literature and the Role of New Instruments for Policy Analysis After having been ignored for a long time by economists, happiness is becoming an object of serious research in 21 century economics. In Section 2 we sketch the present status of happiness economics. In Section 3 we consider the practical applicability of happiness economics, retaining the assumption ...