Predictive analyses taking advantage of the recent explosion in the availability and accessibility of data have been made possible through flexible machine learning methodologies that are often well-suited to the variety and velocity of today’s data collection. This can be witnessed in recent works studying the predictive power of social media data and in the transformation of business practice...

People's beliefs about normality play an important role in many aspects of cognition and life (e.g., causal cognition, linguistic semantics, cooperative behavior). But how do people determine what sorts of things are normal in the first place? Past research has studied both people's representations of statistical norms (e.g., the average) and their representations of prescriptive norms (e.g., t...

Decision theory has changed considerably in the last decade. In behavioral decision theory, a large number of studies have shown that human decision making is inherently adaptive and constructive. In prescriptive decision theory, we have witnessed a move from an alternative-focused approach to a value-focused approach. In this paper, we discuss the implications of these new ideas in behavioral ...

Scientists and philosophers have long wrestled with the problem of how we understand and make sense of our world. There are both descriptive and prescriptive approaches to understanding our world. On the descriptive side, theories of cognition, perception and thinking describe how we humans organize stimuli and make sense out of them. On the prescriptive side, there are two approaches to making...

Business analytics is becoming more and more important nowadays. Up to now predictive analytics appears to be much more applied in practice than prescriptive analytics. We argue that although optimization is used to obtain predictive models, and predictive tools are used to forecast parameters in optimization models, still the deep relation between the predictive and prescriptive analytics is n...

Traditional robots [Siegwart, 2004] rely for their function on computing to store internal representations of their goals and environment and to coordinate sensing and any actuating of components required in response. Moving robotics to the single-molecule level is possible in principle, but faces the limited ability of individual molecules to store complex information and programs. One strateg...

The importance of making good decisions is well-known in the business world and the perception of decision making as rational choice is the most common view. The amount of information involved in many decision making situations has increased dramatically in recent years and support of some kind is often needed. Consequently, fields like Business Intelligence (BI) and Decision Support Systems (D...

In model-driven engineering (MDE), models are mostly used in prescriptive ways for system engineering. While prescriptive models are indeed an important ingredient to realize a system, for later phases in the systems’ lifecycles additional model types are beneficial to use. Unfortunately, current MDE approaches mostly neglect the information upstream in terms of descriptive models from operatio...

The authors used a revised planned behavior model in the consumer domain. The revised model incorporated separate measures of descriptive and injunctive/ prescriptive norms, self-identity, and past behavior in an effort to improve the predictive power of the theory of planned behavior (TPB; I. Ajzen, 1985) in relation to a self-reported consumer behavior: purchasing one’s preferred soft drink. ...