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This volume deals with decision making in economics and the social sciences with a special focus on multicriteria and multiagent decision making. Both classic and recent studies are directed towards the analysis and the formalization of the behaviour of groups, or committees, which are in charge of assuming decisions of common interest. Indeed, knowing paradigms and structures of behaviour plays a determinant role for implementing individual, group, social thinking and action. Each model captures a characteristic feature of the real human behaviour, either at the individual or at the societal level. Focusing transmission or inheritance in both directions is critical. Not less decisive than the forms of rationality are behavioural and psychological aggregates, that are compulsive and often subtle. Collective choices raise questions of consistency, significant degrees of sharing, consensus and acceptation, in an uncertain ambit and over time. Hence the growth of several branches permeating the foundations of decision making, such as mathematical modelling, distributed information, sociology, economics.
List of contents
From the Contents: Development Policies in China: an Analysis of the Territorial Imbalances.- The Generalized Gini Welfare Function in the Framework of Symmetric Choquet Integration.- Credit Crunch in the Euro Area: a Coopetitive Solution.- Pairwise Comparison Matrices over Abelian Linearly Ordered Groups: a Consistency Measure and Weights for the Alternatives.
Summary
The book provides a comprehensive and timely report on the topic of decision making and decision analysis in economics and the social sciences. The various contributions included in the book, selected using a peer review process, present important studies and research conducted in various countries around the globe. The majority of these studies are concerned with the analysis, modeling and formalization of the behavior of groups or committees that are in charge of making decisions of social and economic importance. Decisions in these contexts have to meet precise coherence standards and achieve a significant degree of sharing, consensus and acceptance, even in uncertain and fuzzy environments. This necessitates the confluence of several research fields, such as foundations of social choice and decision making, mathematics, complexity, psychology, sociology and economics. A large spectrum of problems that may be encountered during decision making and decision analysis in the areas of economics and the social sciences, together with a broad range of tools and techniques that may be used to solve those problems, are presented in detail in this book, making it an ideal reference work for all those interested in analyzing and implementing mathematical tools for application to relevant issues involving the economy and society.
