decision_making.html
<!-- can I make a simple decsription of human behavior and decision making that would be a useful categorization for understanding environmental problems -->
three major divisions - 1st -survival , 2nd-building an understanding of the life-world and being included in social interactions, and 3rd-trying to increase utility
survival represents needs
"needs" change with economic status - Maslow 1970
this shift in needs may be part of the human nature that I am looking for
understanding the life-world
aquiring language
belonging to social groups
other descriptions
dealing with other individuals
games -
uncertainty and risk, games against nature
examples:
global warming is an unceratin game/ precautionary principle is the maximin criteria
turning uncertainty into risk makes games more tractable <!-- another value of the universities and research -->
games against other people
need to build toward solutions that are mutually self-reinforcing rather than rely on trust and ethics which are weak constraints (Heap et al 1992 pg ***)
human decisions and game theory
types of "games", interactions
utility functions
defining with preference choices
defining with probabilities that are equivalent to preference choices
**comment- is the precautionary principle an example of a maximin game played against nature?
matrix - what is the best of the worst cases
**comment- can we look at the role of environmental science as playing one or more of the following purposes for society
provide better understanding, to delineate the game, provide context and details that limit the game
turn uncertainty into risk (identifying and quantifying risk factors)
find solutions under constraints (i.e. engineering, science as pre-engineering)
provide a social structure for the debate that is supposedly neutral
decisions can't be made with perfect information (because that doesn't exist)
bounded rationality - Gigerenzer
choices in problem solving
decisions under uncertainty - Tversky and Kahneman
modeling bounded rationality (Rubinstein 1998)
evidence of non-rational behavior
framing effects - how the question is posed
tendency to simplify problems - cancelling out factors
search for reasons - if the motivation is based on "internal" reasons that are unrelated to the problem, it violates rationality assumptions
there is also "information asymmetries" (Schrage, M. 2002. Outsmarting the customer.Tech Review. Oct 2002 pg 22)- that favor the one side
Stiglitz, Akerlog and Spence - 2001 Nobel Prize
obviously, we want to be on the heavy side of this assymetry