Home
Resource
Three essays in the theory of preferences
PDF
PDF format is widely accepted and good for printing.
Plug-in required
PDF-1(754.55 kb)
Citation & Export
View Usage Statistics
Staff View

Citation & Export
Hide

Simple citation

Nosratabadi, Seyed Hassan. Three essays in the theory of preferences. Retrieved from https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-t00x-by36

Export

Click here for information about Citation Management Tools at Rutgers.

Statistics
Hide

Description

TitleThree essays in the theory of preferences
NameNosratabadi, Seyed Hassan (author); Carbonell-Nicolau, Oriol (chair); Sjöström, Tomas (internal member); McLean, Richard (internal member); Ülkü, Levent (outside member); Rutgers University; School of Graduate Studies
Date Created2018
Other Date2018-10 (degree)
SubjectEconomics, Revealed preference theory
Extent1 online resource (88 pages) : illustrations
DescriptionThis dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter addresses the classical questions of utility representation and maximization. It relaxes the notion of weak upper continuity(Campbell and Walker) to obtain a property called partial weak upper continuity and shows that both maximization of preferences and representation by a utility function can be achieved under this new property.


The rest of this dissertation focuses on extending revealed preference theory to accommodate behavioral anomalies observed in the experimental data. In particular, I offer a framework to expand the theory of revealed preferences to the case where a DM's choice is not completely identified with a single preferences.

In Chapter 2, I use a divide and conquer procedure in order to expand the revealed preference theory to accommodate behavioral anomalies such as attraction effect, compromise effect, and reverse dominance effect. These effects are induced when a third alternative is used as a "decoy" to change the relative ranking from a pair. Therefore, they could be rationalized using the notion of referenced preferences: that is, when the pairwise preference between a pair of alternatives is referenced when a third alternative. I model such behavior as a partially rational inductive divide and conquer procedure where the deviation from WARP only take place on tripletons where references operate. Keeping the rational choice axioms on sets with higher cardinalities retains the predictive power in the classical theory to the extent possible. In order to do this, I assume a DM only drops reference elements when facing more than one such elements in a set. I show that under this particular division rule the choice is characterized via simple majority rule over the collection of referenced preference.

In Chapter 3, I consider a variation of the results in Chapter 2 where in dividing a set of alternative in an inductive manner, the DM considers all possible first-diminished subsets. I show that such division rule results in a more sophisticated behavior than the simple majority rule. Here the DM uses here referenced preferences over the pairwise preference in a consecutive manner to squeeze the choice problem.
This, indeed is an extension of the rational short-list method in Manzini and Mariotti (2007) with three preference. The distinction, however, is that the method is enogenized in this set up.
NotePh.D.
NoteIncludes bibliographical references
Noteby Seyed Hassan Nosratabadi
Genretheses, ETD doctoral
Persistent URLhttps://doi.org/doi:10.7282/t3-t00x-by36
Languageeng
CollectionSchool of Graduate Studies Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Organization NameRutgers, The State University of New Jersey
RightsThe author owns the copyright to this work.
Version 8.5.5
Rutgers University Libraries - Copyright ©2024