Engineering and Applied Sciences

While Stochastic Dominance has been employed in various forms as early as 1932, it has only been since 1969--1970 that the notion has been developed and extensively employed in the area of economics, finance, agriculture, statistics, marketing and operations research. In this survey, the first-,...

We show that a "suspicious" subjective expected utility (SEU) maximizer, i.e., one who treats potential consequences of states as information useful in assessing the probability of those states, may under reasonable circumstances act as though he were maximizing either weighted linear utility,...

We show how to calibrate a prospect model of decision making under risk for an individual. The prospect model is empirically compared to a utility model on two criteria, verification of the postulates of each model, and predictive accuracy. The empirical comparison is performed via three...

Certainty equivalence (CE) and probability equivalence (PE) methods are the two most frequently used procedures for constructing von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions. In this paper, we compare these methods experimentally, using a two-stage within-subject design. By asking subjects first...

This paper investigates the problem of obtaining a compromise/consensus from a set of ordinal rankings of n objects supplied by m committee members. Earlier work by Cook and Seiford (Cook, Wade D., Lawrence M. Seiford. 1978. Priority ranking and consensus formation. Management Sci. 24 (16)...

Utility functions are an important component of normative decision analysis, in that they characterize the nature of people's risk-taking attitudes. In this paper we examine various factors that make it difficult to speak of the utility function for a given person. Similarly we show that it is...

This paper investigates the Borda-Kendall method for the determination of a consensus ranking. It is shown that in the case of ties the method does not perform as claimed. A "minimum variance" method for determining the consensus ranking is proposed and its properties examined. It is shown to be...