One of the central considerations in the theory of Markov chains is their convergence to an equilibrium. Coefficients of ergodicity provide an efficient method for such an analysis. Besides giving sufficient and sometimes necessary conditions for convergence, they additionally measure its rate....

The role of electoral incentives vs. selection is ideally analyzed in a setting where the same legislators are selected to decide on policies under different electoral rules and where voter preferences on policies can be precisely measured. This is the first paper to look at such a situation....

In this paper we consider the classical problem of dividing a land among many agents so that everybody is satisfied with the parcel she receives. In the literature, it is usually assumed that all the agents are endowed with cardinally comparable, additive, and monotone utility functions. In many...

We assign a probabilistic evaluation to a firm as a measure, in the form of a probability distribution over [0,1], of the quality of the firm’s products. When two firms compete to develop a new product, a prospective investor can use the two evaluations to determine which firm is likely to...

Suppose that a decision maker provides a weak order on a given set of alternatives, each alternative being described by a vector of scores, which are given on a finite ordinal scale $E$. The paper addresses the question of the representation of this weak order by some mean operator, and gives...

We present in this paper necessary and sufficient conditions for the representation of preferences in a decision making problem, by the Sugeno integral, in a purely ordinal framework. We distinguish between strong and weak representations.

A preference profile has a one-dimensional Euclidean representation if it can be derived from an arrangement of individuals and alternatives on a line, with each individual preferring the nearer of each pair of alternatives. We provide a polynomial-time algorithm that determines whether a given...

A single-issue spatial election is a voter preference profile derived from an arrangement of candidates and voters on a line, with each voter preferring the nearer of each pair of candidates. We provide a polynomial-time algorithm that determines whether a given preference profile is a...

One approach for solving decision problems involving multiple objectives is interactive optimization. Methods based on this approach assess the decision maker's preference structure interactively, typically based on pairwise comparisons and tradeoffs, and guide the search process toward...