Malthus revisited: Fertility decision making based on quasi-linear preferences

Viewpoint: Sustainability: Malthus revisited?

The sustainability debate concerns whether the world will experience stable or improving living standards for the foreseeable future, or whether the current trajectory will overtax the natural environment, leading to a ‘crash’ in living standards. This paper selectively reviews relevant research, focusing on both ecological concerns and technological progress, and asks whether sustainability wo...

Cooperative Decision Making: A Methodology Based on Collective Preferences Aggregation

The benefice of a collective decisions process mainly rests upon the possibility for the participants to confront their respective points of views. To this end, they must have cognitive and technical tools that ease the sharing of the reasons that motivate their own preferences, while accounting for information and feelings they should keep for their own. The paper presents the basis of such a ...

A Multi-Attribute Decision Making Model Based on Distance from Decision Maker's Preferences

This paper proposes a new multi-attribute ranking procedure based on distance from decision-maker preferences. This method has two phases. In the first phase, the decision maker is asked to define the preferred performance for each attribute. In the second phase, Weighted Sum method and new distance-based normalization procedure are used to determine the overall performance rating of alternatives.

Malthus to modernity: England's first fertility

Reference-based preferences aggregation procedures in multi-criteria decision making

This paper aims at introducing and investigating a new family of merely qualitative models for multicriteria decision making. Such models do not require any numerical representation. Within this family, we will focus on decision rules using reference levels in order to help comparing several alternatives. We will investigate both the descriptive potential of such rules and their axiomatic found...