A scholarly gulf has tended to divide historians, political scientists, and social movement theorists on how people develop and act on their preferences. Rational choice scholars assumed that people—regardless of the time and place in which they live—try to achieve certain goals, like maximizing their personal wealth or power. In contrast, comparative historical scholars have emphasized historical context in explaining people's behavior. Recently, a common emphasis on how institutions—such as unions or governments—influence people's preferences in particular situations has emerged, promising to narrow the divide between the two intellectual camps. In Preferences and Situations, editors Ira Katnelson and Barry Weingast seek to expand that common ground by bringing together an esteemed group of contributors to address the ways in which institutions, in their wider historical setting, induce people to behave in certain ways and steer the course of history. The contributors examine a diverse group of topics to assess the role that institutions play in shaping people's preferences and decision-making. For example, Margaret Levi studies two labor unions to determine how organizational preferences are established. She discusses how the individual preferences of leaders crystallize and become cemented into an institutional culture through formal rules and informal communication. To explore how preferences alter with time, David Brady, John Ferejohn, and Jeremy Pope examine why civil rights legislation that failed to garner sufficient support in previous decades came to pass Congress in 1964. Ira Katznelson reaches back to the 13th century to discuss how the institutional development of Parliament after the signing of the Magna Carta led King Edward I to reframe the view of the British crown toward Jews and expel them in 1290. The essays in this book focus on preference formation and change, revealing a great deal of overlap between two schools of thought that were previously considered mutually exclusive. Though the scholarly debate over the merits of historical versus rational choice institutionalism will surely rage on, Preferences and Situations reveals how each field can be enriched by the other.

One of the main themes that has emerged from behavioral decision research during the past three decades is the view that people's preferences are often constructed in the process of elicitation. This idea is derived from studies demonstrating that normatively equivalent methods of elicitation (e.g., choice and pricing) give rise to systematically different responses. These preference reversals violate the principle of procedure invariance that is fundamental to all theories of rational choice. If different elicitation procedures produce different orderings of options, how can preferences be defined and in what sense do they exist? This book shows not only the historical roots of preference construction but also the blossoming of the concept within psychology, law, marketing, philosophy, environmental policy, and economics. Decision making is now understood to be a highly contingent form of information processing, sensitive to task complexity, time pressure, response mode, framing, reference points, and other contextual factors.

Nowadays, decision problems are pervaded with incomplete knowledge, i.e., imprecision and/or uncertain information, both in the problem description and in the preferential information. In this volume leading scientists in the field address various theoretical and practical aspects related to the handling of this incompleteness. The problems discussed are taken from multi-objective linear programming, rationality considerations in preference modelling, non-probabilistic utility theory, data fusion, group decision making and multicriteria decision aid. The book is oriented towards researchers, graduate and postgraduate students in decision analysis, fuzzy sets and fuzzy logic, and operations research/management science.

The book compiles research on Condorcet's Paradox over some two centuries. It begins with a historical overview of the discovery of Condorcet's Paradox in the 18th Century, reviews numerous studies conducted to find actual occurrences of the paradox, and compiles research that has been done to develop mathematical representations for the probability that the paradox will be observed. Combines all approaches that have been used to study this very interesting phenomenon.

The main features of the just society, as they would be chosen by the unanimous, impartial, and fully informed judgment of its members, present a remarkable and simple meaningful structure. In this society, individuals' freedom is fully respected, and overall redistribution amounts to an equal sharing of individuals' different earnings obtained by the same limited 'equalization labour'. The concept of equalization labour is a measure of the degree of community, solidarity, reciprocity, redistribution, and equalization of the society under consideration. It is determined by a number of methods presented in this study, which also emphasizes the rationality, meanings, properties, and ways of practical implementation of this optimum distribution. This result is compared with the various distributive principles found in practice and in political, philosophical, and economic thinking, with the conclusion that most have their proper specific scope of application. The analytical presentation of the social ethics of economics is particularly enlightening.

On behalf of the Organizing Committee, we would like to welcome you to the proccedings of the 23rd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling (ER 2004). This conference provided an international forum for technical discussion on conceptual modeling of information systems among researchers, developers and users. This was the third time that this conference was held in Asia; the?rst time was in Singapore in 1998 and the second time was in Yokohama, Japan in 2001. China is the third largest nation with the largest population in the world. Shanghai, the largest city in China and a great metropolis, famous in Asia and throughout the world, is therefore a most appropriate location to host this conference. This volume contains papers selected for presentation and includes the two keynote talks by Prof. Hector Garcia-Molina and Prof. Gerhard Weikum, and an invited talk by Dr. Xiao Ji. This volume also contains industrial papers and demo/poster papers. An additional volume contains papers from 6 workshops. The conference also featured three tutorials: (1) Web Change Management andDelta Mining: Opportunities andSolutions, by SanjayMadria, (2)A Survey of Data Quality Issues in Cooperative Information Systems, by Carlo Batini, and (3) Visual SQL - An ER-Based Introduction to Database Programming, by Bernhard Thalheim.

Why are there often sudden abrupt changes in public opinion on political issues? Or total reversals in congressional support for specific legislation? Jones aims to answer these questions by connecting insights from cognitive science and rational-choice theory to political life.