One of the most distinguishing abilities that human beings display is the ability of turning almost everything into a clue to make a problem affordable in relation to what one knows and, most of all, to what one does not know. That is what characterizes humans as chance seekers. A poor pattern of reasoning and even our ignorance may help us make a decision, and eventually solve a problem. This is the rationale of biased rationality. However, not everything leads us always to a good decision. Some people are not satisfied with weak arguments or it-is-just-so strategies. They want something better. This second attitude points to a different form of rationality that takes advantage of the idea of distributed cognition. Basically, human beings improve their survival strategies by building cognitive niches capable of delivering potentially ever more symptomatic information. It is through various manipulations of the environment that we gain new and more reliable chances which can be used to de-bias our rationality. Through the laborious activity of cognitive niche construction, we come up with situations in which we are better afforded by our environment, and thus biases or fallacies cease to be appealing.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1975.

This book presents the definitive exposition of 'prospect theory', a compelling alternative to the classical utility theory of choice. Building on the 1982 volume, Judgement Under Uncertainty, this book brings together seminal papers on prospect theory from economists, decision theorists, and psychologists, including the work of the late Amos Tversky, whose contributions are collected here for the first time. While remaining within a rational choice framework, prospect theory delivers more accurate, empirically verified predictions in key test cases, as well as helping to explain many complex, real-world puzzles. In this volume, it is brought to bear on phenomena as diverse as the principles of legal compensation, the equity premium puzzle in financial markets, and the number of hours that New York cab drivers choose to drive on rainy days. Theoretically elegant and empirically robust, this volume shows how prospect theory has matured into a new science of decision making.

Brand risk is often narrowly defined as risk to reputation. Yet risk and uncertainty are evident in many aspects of brand performance and marketing operations. Considered and responsible risk-taking is central to effective brand management. Risk literacy is the marketer’s third necessary competence, alongside strategic insight and financial understanding. In Brand Risk, a practical and accessible book for those who hold responsibilities in marketing or risk management, David Abrahams brings together relevant risk thinking and a range of techniques for the evaluation of brand exposures and opportunities - whether in response to the ambitions of a key business project, new market conditions or shareholder concern. A balanced review of the subject is enriched by reference to topics of current interest and is supported by illustrative examples throughout. Presenting the essentials of brand management and risk management side-by-side, Brand Risk offers graduated and complementary approaches to brand risk assessment, from the intuitive to the data-driven.

The book addresses a number of recent topics at the crossroad of philosophy and cognitive science, taking advantage of both the western and the eastern perspectives and conceptions that emerged and were discussed at the PCS2011 Conference recently held in Guangzhou. The ever growing cultural exchange between academics and intellectual belonging to different cultures is reverberated by the juxtaposition of papers, which aim at investigating new facets of crucial problems in philosophy: the role of models in science and the fictional approach; chance seeking dynamics and how affordances work; abductive cognition; visualization in science; the cognitive structure of scientific theories; scientific representation; mathematical representation in science; model-based reasoning; analogical reasoning; moral cognition; cognitive niches and evolution.

The four-volume set LNAI 6881-LNAI 6884 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2011, held in Kaiserslautern, Germany, in September 2011. Part 2: The total of 244 high-quality papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The 70 papers of Part 2 are organized in topical sections on web intelligence, text and multimedia mining and retrieval, intelligent tutoring systems and e-learning environments, other / misc. intelligent systems topics, methods and techniques of artificial and computational intelligence in economics, finance and decision making, workshop on seamless integration of semantic technologies in computer-supported office work (sistcow), innovations in chance discovery, advanced knowledge-based systems, recent trends in knowledge engineering, smart systems, and their applications.

The four-volume set LNAI 6276--6279 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Knowledge-Based Intelligent Information and Engineering Systems, KES 2010, held in Cardiff, UK, in September 2010. The 272 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 360 submissions. They present the results of high-quality research on a broad range of intelligent systems topics.