Estimating joint probabilities plays an important role in many data mining and machine learning tasks. In this paper we introduce two methods, minAB and prodAB, to estimate joint probabilities. Both methods are based on a light-weight structure, partition support . The core idea is to maintain the partition support of itemsets over logically disjoint partitions and then use it to estimate joint...

Quantity discount pricing is a common practice used by business-to-business and business-toconsumer companies. A key characteristic of quantity discount pricing is that the marginal price declines with higher purchase quantities. In this paper, we propose a choice-based conjoint model for estimating consumer-level willingness-to-pay (WTP) for varying quantities of a product and for designing op...

The theory of intertemporal choice predicts that the cross-sectional variance of the marginal utility of consumption is equal to its own lag plus a constant and a random component. Using general preference specifications and some assumptions about the nature of the random component, we provide an explicit test of this hypothesis. Our approach circumvents the necessity to identify a pure age pro...

An emerging strategy to gain insight into the conditions and con gurations in the core of the Internet is the use of end-to-end measurements from a set of distributed measurement points. As the number of measurement points increases, so does the number of paths through the network that can be studied, which is an argument for a \more is better" approach to wide-area measurement. However, basic ...

Many techniques have been proposed for discerning internet topology, but not so many of them have been studied for their utility: the returns in information that they provide as their number of measurements increases. We define a probabilistic model for representing a map built on uncertain observations. We propose new utility metrics and reuse existing metrics in combination with this model to...

The paper assesses the welfare effects of different ways of allocating input price risk between a regulated utility, consumers and speculators in a futures market. A risk-averse utility setting a fixed retail price requires a price that exceeds expected marginal cost, unless an efficient futures market is available. The firm bears no risk when input price risk is transferred to consumers, but c...

Eliciting the utility of a decision maker is difficult. In this paper, we develop a flexible decision making framework, which uses the concept of utility robustness to address the problem of ambiguity and inconsistency in utility assessments. The ideas are developed by giving a probabilistic interpretation to utility and marginal utility functions. Boundary and additional conditions are used to...

Marginal utility theory prescribes the relationship between the objective property of the magnitude of rewards and their subjective value. Despite its pervasive influence, however, there is remarkably little direct empirical evidence for such a theory of value, let alone of its neurobiological basis. We show that human preferences in an intertemporal choice task are best described by a model th...

Complex systems display behavior at a range of scales. Large-scale behaviors can emerge from the correlated or dependent behavior of individual small-scale components. To capture this observation in a rigorous and general way, we introduce a formalism for multiscale information theory. Dependent behavior among system components results in overlapping or shared information. A system’s structure ...

One of the surprises that came with the development and applications of expected utility theory to economics was the realization that risk aversion alone does not give rise to precautionary saving. As modeled by Leland (1968), precautionary saving was interpreted as an increase in saving in the current period if future income has the same mean but becomes less certain. Leland found that existen...