Human decision making underlies data generating process in multiple application areas, and models explaining and predicting choices made by individuals are in high demand. Discrete choice models are widely studied in economics and computational social sciences. As digital social networking facilitates information flow and spread of influence between individuals, new advances in modeling are nee...

The paper examines if and how state-level labor market, agricultural, and demographic conditions, public aid provisions, minimum wages, and border patrol intensities persuade or dissuade illegal and legal farmworker migration from Mexico. The study uses a nationally-representative survey of farmworkers that provides direct data on legal status, and qualitative choice modeling of individual loca...

We study the effects of input variability on choice reaction time (choice-RT) models under the two-alternative, forced choice paradigm. We test the well known and widely used (by choice-RT models) assumption that slower errors are produced under higher input-strength variability conditions (between blocks of trials). Two experiments, featuring a ‘numerosity task’, are presented. Analysis of the...

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The topological approach to social choice was developed by Graciela Chichilnisky in the beginning of the 1980s. The main result in this area (known as the resolution of the topological social choice paradox) shows that a space of preferences admits of a continuous, anonymous, and unanimous aggregation rule for every number of individuals if and only if this space is contractible. Furthermore, c...

We take a decision theoretic approach to the classic social choice problem, using data on the frequency of choice problems to compute social choice functions. We define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population’s preferences and on the probability distribution over the sets of feasible alternatives that the society will face. Our methods generalize the well-known Kemeny Rule...

1. revised and extended axiomatic theory and proof development. 2. a new curriculum with extensive questions, intuitive illustrations of key concepts, exercises in formal proofs, and an emphasis on the use of mathematical logic as a formal tool for the analysis of informal concept". 3. parallel languages-a completely new formal language containing concise formulas for use in proofs together wit...

In large scale collective decision making, social choice is a normative study of how one ought to design a protocol for reaching consensus. However, in instances where the underlying decision space is too large or complex for ordinal voting, standard voting methods of social choice may be impractical. In such circumstances, one would like to have a general way of discovering socially preferable...

The electoral models based on the early work of Hotelling (1929) and Downs (1957) essentially suppose that the motivation of parties is to win a majority of the votes or seats. A very considerable literature developed in the period up to 1973 (ably summarized by Riker and Ordeshook, 1973), focusing on two party competition and the existence of convergent equilibrium at the electoral median. McK...

This thesis concerns a specific procedure for social choice of a group action under uncertainty. It consists of three main parts. First we investigate formal desiderata for the single agent case. Next the model’s position relative to varying disciplines is considered. Finally we provide an implementation of the full multiagent model in the programming language Haskell.