This paper introduces a framework to study the links between the supply of liquid assets for the financial market and the international allocation of economic activity. Private assets’ liquidity properties—their usefulness as collateral or media of exchange in financial transactions— affect assets’ values and interest rates, with consequences on firm entry, production, aggregate productivity, a...

We consider queueing systems with generally distributed abandonment times. By explicitly modeling the waiting time of the first customer in line, we obtain a natural bounded jump Markov process allowing for uniformization. This approach is useful to solve, via dynamic programming, various optimization problems where the objectives and/or constraints involve the distributions of the performance ...

This paper extends our earlier work on reverse Bayesianism by relaxing the assumption that decision makers abide by expected utility theory, assuming instead weaker axioms that merely imply that they are probabilistically sophisticated. We show that our main results, namely, (modified) representation theorems and corresponding rules for updating beliefs over expanding state spaces and null even...

Group Support Systems (GSS) play an important role in streamlining group activities and improving group outcomes. Various attempts have been made to help automate certain group tasks under GSS environment. Since concept classification in GSS requires group users to manually process a large volume of brainstorming comments into concept categories, it is useful to apply artificial intelligence te...

Starting, at first, from some little known but notable formal remarks made by the mathematician Gabriele Darbo about the qualitative dimensional analysis of the physical quantities, for then, above all, take into account some latest science education (d’après diSessa) and philosophy (d’après Gärdenfors) research results, it shall be possible, paraphrasing a celebrated 1851 work of Arthur Schope...

AIM To ascertain utility values associated with varying degrees of legal blindness. METHODS A cross sectional study on three group of patients. There were: (1) 15 patients with complete absence of vision (no light perception) in at least one eye who were asked to assume a scenario of no light perception in the second eye as well, (2) 17 patients with light perception to counting fingers in th...

The present theory leads to a set of subjective weights such that the utility of an uncertain alternative (gamble) is partitioned into three terms involving those weights — a conventional subjectively weighted utility function over pure consequences, a subjectively weighted value function over events, and a subjectively weighted function of the subjective weights. Under several assumptions, thi...

Elicitation of an exact utility function of a decision maker is challenging. In this paper, we address the problem of ambiguity and inconsistency in utility assessments by studying a robust utility-based decision making model where the utility function belongs to a set of general increasing utility functions. We build a robust framework in which the utility function belongs to a set. This set o...

Rational decision making requires full knowledge of the utility function of the person affected by the decisions. However, in many cases, the task of acquiring such knowledge is not feasible due to the size of the outcome space and the complexity of the utility elicitation process. Given that the amount of utility information we can acquire is limited, we need to make decisions with partial uti...