Open Access
Ranking sets additively in decisional contexts: an axiomatic characterization
(2006) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Rodríguez Alcantud, José Carlos; Economía; Ekonomia
Ranking finite subsets of a given set X of elements is the formal object of analysis in this paper. This problem has found a wide range of economic interpretations in the literature. The focus of the paper is on the family of rankings that are additively representable. Existing characterizations are too complex and hard to grasp in decisional contexts. Furthermore, Fishburn [13] showed that the number of sufficient and necessary conditions that are needed to characterize such a family has no upper bound as the cardinality of X increases. In turn, this paper proposes a way to overcome these difficulties and allows for the characterization of a meaningful (sub)family of additively representable rankings of sets by means of a few simple axioms. Pattanaik and Xu’s [21] characterization of the cardinality based rule will be derived from our main result, and other new rules that stem from our general proposal are discussed and characterized in even simpler terms. In particular, we analyze restricted-cardinality based rules, where the set of “focal” elements is not given ex-ante; but brought out by the axioms.
Open Access
On freedom of choice, ambiguity, and the preference for easy choices
(2006) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Economía; Ekonomia
This paper is devoted to the study of opportunity set comparisons when the characteristics of the options within the sets in question may be ambiguous. We assume that agents display a preference for freedom of choice, but also aversion to the presence of ambiguous options. We propose a suitable environment for approaching this problem, and provide axiomatic characterizations of several rules for ranking sets in such a context.
Open Access
Attitudes toward choice with incomplete preferences: an experimental study
(Elsevier, 2022) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Bourgeois-Gironde, Sacha; Hualde Vidaurre, Mikel; Economía; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Gobierno de Navarra / Nafarroako Gobernua; Universidad Pública de Navarra / Nafarroako Unibertsitate Publikoa, PJUPNA19-2022
We present an experiment to test different individual attitudes toward choice, such as preference for flexibility, choice aversion, betweenness and choice neutrality. Unlike other related experimental papers, we want to analyze whether different choice attitudes can coexist for the same subject, depending on the characteristics of the choice set she is facing. In particular, our main hypothesis is that the presence of incomparability among the alternatives in the choice set, and the time at which such incomparability is solved, affect crucially the kind of attitude towards choice that the subject will exhibit. We find that, indeed, choice attitudes are not homogeneous across choice sets, yet they are conditional on the preferences over the alternatives. We also find some evidence supporting that subjects tend to value heuristically sets as a whole.
Open Access
On the equivalence of the two existing extensions of the leximax criterion to the infinite case
(2006) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Ballester Oyarzun, Miguel Ángel; Besada, M.; Miguel Velasco, Juan Ramón de; Nieto Vázquez, Jorge; Vázquez, C.; Economía; Ekonomia
Using a common framework, we consider the two existing extensions of the leximax criterion to infinite environments (Arlegi et al. (2005) and Ballester and De Miguel (2003), and show that, though the respective definitions of the rules and their axiomatic characterizations appear to differ considerably, they actually propose the same extension of the leximax criterion to the infinite case.
Open Access
On procedural freedom of choice
(2004) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Economía; Ekonomia
Numerous works in the last decade have analyzed the question of how to compare opportunity sets as a way to measure and evaluate individual freedom of choice. This paper defends that, in many contexts, external procedural aspects that are associated to an opportunity set should be taken into account when making judgements about the freedom of choice an agent enjoys. We propose criteria for comparing procedure-based opportunity sets that are consistent with both the procedural aspect of freedom and most of the standard theories of ranking opportunity sets.
Open Access
A theory of choice under internal conflict
(2012) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Teschl, Miriam; Economía; Ekonomia
In this paper we discuss, inspired by some psychological literature, that choices are the outcome of the interplay of different, potentially conflicting motivations. We propose an axiomatic approach with two motivations, which we assume to be single-peaked over a certain given dimension. We first consider the case in which motivations are given and stable, and then introduce the possibility for motivations to change. We show first that in the no-motivation change case, certain choice behaviours that appear to be inconsistent from the standard rational choice point of view may be explained in our framework as the outcome of conflicting motivations. Afterwards, in the case of motivation change, we present two psychologically-flavoured assumptions about how motivations are influenced by choices. We show that, with some additional weak assumptions of rationality, motivation change leads to a smaller range of potentially inconsistent choices and not to a larger one as one may think. In particular, conflicts between two motivations can eventually be resolved by choosing different actions and consequently a definite and final preference for an action be revealed.
Open Access
Uncertainty with ordinal likelihood information
(2007) Alcalde Unzu, Jorge; Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Economía; Ekonomia
This paper proposes a new framework of choice under uncertainty, where the only information available to the decision maker is about the the ordinal likelihood of the different outcomes each action generates. This contrasts both with the classical models where the potential outcomes of each action have an associated probability distribution, and with the more recent complete uncertainty models, where the agent has no information whatever about the probability of the outcomes, even of an ordinal nature. We present an impossibility result in our framework, and some ways to circumvent it that result in different ranking rules.
Open Access
Manipulative agendas in four-candidate elections
(Elsevier, 2020) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Dimitrov, Dinko; Ekonomia; Institute for Advanced Research in Business and Economics - INARBE; Economía
We consider a setting where it is known for an electorate what probability a given candidate has of beating another in a pairwise ballot. An agenda assigns candidates to the leaves of a binary tree and is called manipulative if it inverts the final winning probabilities for two candidates. We compare standard and symmetric agendas in four-candidate elections and show that in monotone environments the former are more manipulative.
Open Access
Equality of opportunities: cardinality-based criteria
(1998) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Nieto Vázquez, Jorge; Economía; Ekonomia
In this paper we study possible rankings of opportunity profiles. An opportunity profile is a list of sets of alternative opportunities, one set for each agent in the society. We compare such opportunity profiles on the basis of the notion of “equality of opportunities”. Our main results show the necessary and sufficient conditions for this comparison to be made using exclusively the information provided by two cardinal measures: the number of common alternatives for all sets in a given profile and/or the difference between the number of alternatives of individual sets. We also show that, under given circumstances, the only way to solve conflicts between these two numbers is to combine them in a lexicographic procedure.
Open Access
Freedom of choice: the leximax criterion in economic environments
(2000) Arlegi Pérez, Ricardo; Besada, M.; Nieto Vázquez, Jorge; Vázquez, C.; Economía; Ekonomia
Many recent works have investigated the question of extending a preference over a set of alternatives to its power set, as a way to provide a formal representation of the notion of freedom of choice. In general, the results are limited to the finite case, which excludes the case of economic environments. This paper deals with the possibility of extending those results to the context where the basic set of alternatives is the n-dimensional Euclidean space. We present an extension of the leximax criterion of Bossert, Pattanaik and Xu (1994) on this more general framework. This characterization result opens the possibility of application of the literature on freedom of choice to standard economic environments.