A characterization of ‘min’ as a procedure for exploiting valued preference relations and related results

This paper is concerned with procedures which transform valued preference relations on a set of alternatives into crisp relations. We present a simple characterization of a procedure that ranks alternatives in decreasing order of their minimal performance. This is done by means of three axioms that are shown to be independent. Among other results, we characterize in a very similar manner a procedure called ‘leximin’ and investigate two families of procedures whose intersection is the ‘min’ procedure.     

How Single Older Men Reach Poverty and Its Relationship with Help-Seeking Preferences1

This study aimed to clarify patterns of poverty among single older men and examine this population's help-seeking preferences. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 83 older single men in poverty. Three main patterns of poverty were identified: lifelong, job turnover, and retirement. A common characteristic among these patterns indicated that they did not recognize their difficulties as problems. Furthermore, we identified five groups of help-receiving preferences: independent, resignation, mutual-aid, other-oriented, and seeking. Among these, the independent and resignation groups were influenced by past experiences of failing to seek help, which was characteristic of the lifelong pattern type. Furthermore, the mutual-aid and seeking groups were oriented toward positive help-seeking, which was characteristic of the job turnover and retirement pattern types. However, neither group actively sought help for social isolation or lack of social support, suggesting that it would have been challenging to establish social relationships early on in life. Thus, it is important to establish initiatives that enable older people to understand their current state and to think about their future depending on three patterns of poverty.     

Development and validation of a measure for emotion regulation at work: Introducing the Workplace Emotion Regulation Preference Inventory (WERPI)

Emotion regulation preference varies from person to person. However, the emotion regulation literature has mostly dichotomized preference to cognitive change and response modulation. The current investigation focused on development and validation of a comprehensive measure of workplace emotion regulation and examined the relationship between all emotion regulation strategies using a well-known taxonomy (Gross, 1998) and customer service performance. Preliminary evidence supports the validity of the new measure. The four groups identified in this analysis showed significant differences on customer service performance, suggesting that individual differences in regulation preference may be important to consider. Theoretical and practical implications of findings are discussed.     

Do Programmers Prefer Predictable Expressions in Code?

Source code is a form of human communication, albeit one where the information shared between the programmers reading and writing the code is constrained by the requirement that the code executes correctly. Programming languages are more syntactically constrained than natural languages, but they are also very expressive, allowing a great many different ways to express even very simple computations. Still, code written by developers is highly predictable, and many programming tools have taken advantage of this phenomenon, relying on language model surprisal as a guiding mechanism. While surprisal has been validated as a measure of cognitive load in natural language, its relation to human cognitive processes in code is still poorly understood. In this paper, we explore the relationship between surprisal and programmer preference at a small granularity—do programmers prefer more predictable expressions in code? Using meaning-preserving transformations, we produce equivalent alternatives to developer-written code expressions and run a corpus study on Java and Python projects. In general, language models rate the code expressions developers choose to write as more predictable than these transformed alternatives. Then, we perform two human subject studies asking participants to choose between two equivalent snippets of Java code with different surprisal scores (one original and transformed). We find that programmers do prefer more predictable variants, and that stronger language models like the transformer align more often and more consistently with these preferences.     

A parameter analysis method for the weight‐set to satisfy preference orders of alternatives in additive multi‐criteria value models

In the context of the additive multi‐criteria value model, this paper investigates how the set of criteria weights (weight‐set hereafter) can be determined according to the preference orders of alternatives given by the decision maker. A construction method is proposed for the weight‐set for different intervals of β, where β is a differential amount of value between the preference information on two alternatives. The results of this paper are important for sensitivity analysis in multi‐criteria decision making (MCDM) problems and multi‐criteria group decision analysis. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Intelligence and Extraversion in the neural evaluation of delayed rewards

Temporal discounting (TD), the preference for earlier, smaller rewards over delayed, larger rewards, is a pervasive phenomenon that covaries with Big Five personality traits and Intelligence (IQ). This study provides novel insight by identifying correlates for IQ and Extraversion in the neural representation of TD preferences. An intertemporal choice task was employed, where offers were sequentially presented, distinguishing between one evaluation phase (first offer is presented) and one comparison phase (second offer is presented and values are compared). IQ correlated with responses of caudate nucleus to the subjective values of the offers, suggesting a role of cognitive abilities in modulating reward responses. Extraversion correlated with the strength of functional connectivity of a reward evaluation network centered on ventromedial prefrontal cortex.     

Relative importance of criteria: a quantitative approach

A mathematical definition for the assertion ‘a group of criteria A is more important than a group of criteria B’ is introduced. It is shown how quantitative information on relative importance of criteria allows us to obtain a more precise upper estimate for a set of all non-dominated solutions than the well-known Pareto set. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Experimental consideration of preference in decision making under certainty

This paper describes an experiment in decision making under certainty with multiple, conflicting objectives and continuous decision variables. Two techniques for analysing such problems are considered: one taken from the paradigm of multicriteria decision making (MCDM), a non-directed approach called the NAIVE technique, and one from the paradigm of multiattribute decision analysis (D/A), the SMART technique. While the two techniques seek and are throught to arrive at the same end—a solution which is in some sense optimal for the decision maker (DM)—the former approach implicitly incorporates DM preferences while the latter approach considers preferences explicitly. The setting is a laboratory study using a sample of university students on a three-criteria problem which is designed to study the extent to which value functions implied/assessed by the techniques are consistent with DMs' holistic ranking of alternatives. Results show that (1) the two techniques of interest show significantly better rank order correlation with holistic judgement compared with other techniques, (2) DMs prefer the non-directed MCDM approach and (3) subjects break down into two groups: those that use assessable value functions when ranking and those that do not. This implies that for small-dimensioned problems DMs may first need to be classified as to the assessability of their value functions before a solution method is chosen.     

Comparing stimulus preference and response force in a conjugate preparation

Researchers used a conjugate preparation to evaluate how response force changed based on participants' preferences for visual stimuli. First, researchers used a verbal preference assessment to evaluate each participant's preference for viewing for five object categories of visual stimuli; this process identified high preference (HP) stimuli and low preference stimuli for most participants. Thereafter, researchers exposed each participant to the five stimulus categories in a randomized order while using a force dynamometer to measure their response force to increase visual clarity of each stimulus. Results indicate the majority of participants' HP stimuli corresponded to the stimulus category for which they exerted the highest mean force. These preliminary findings suggest conjugate preparations involving response force may provide another option for measuring the relative value of some stimulus events.