Harsanyi’s utilitarianism is extended here to Savage’s framework. We formulate a Pareto condition that implies that both society’s utility function and its probability measure are linear combinations of those of the individuals. An indiscriminate Pareto condition has been shown to contradict linear aggregation of beliefs and tastes. We argue that such a condition is not compelling: Society shou...

In a previous study, it was found that positive, palatability-dependent consummatory reactions in rats to intraorally infused tastes were facilitated by chlordiazepoxide (10 mg/kg). In contrast, the rats' more neutral or aversive reactions to these tastes were not facilitated by chlordiazepoxide. This suggested that chlordiazepoxide might selectively enhance the positive palatability of tastes....

Divergence is a fact of social life; people select different tastes to distinguish themselves from others and they abandon tastes when others adopt them. But while we know a great deal about conformity, it predicts convergence, and thus is less equipped to explain why people diverge. We suggest people diverge to maintain clear signals of identity. Our approach emphasizes that the meaning of sig...

In this paper, based on a weighted projection of the user-object bipartite network, we study the effects of user tastes on the mass-diffusion-based personalized recommendation algorithm, where a user’s tastes or interests are defined by the average degree of the objects he has collected. We argue that the initial recommendation power located on the objects should be determined by both of their ...

The venerable admonition not to quarrel over tastes is commonly interpreted as advice to terminate a dispute when it has been resolved into a difference of tastes, presumably because there is no further room for rational persuasion. Tastes are the unchallengeable axioms of a man's behavior: he may properly (usefully) be criticized for inefficiency in satisfying his desires, but the desires them...

This paper offers the first case study of Swedish soft drink Pommac, launched in 1919, and how brand established itself as ‘taste summer’. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis to examine a large dataset Pommac advertisements, it traces brand's development over its forty years on market (1920–1960), identifying ways which summer was depicted this shifted time accordance with changes soci...