QUEEN’S BUSINESS SCHOOL ECONOMICS SEMINAR SERIES

Monday 27^th October

3pm

"Decisions over Sequences" (written with Bhavook Bhardwaj at Ca' Foscari University in Venice)

Abstract

This paper introduces a model of decision making where a decision maker examines alternatives sequentially. We study a class of objects called decision rules that map infinite sequences of alternatives to a decision space. Within the class of decision rules, we focus on two natural subclasses - Stopping Rules and Uniform Stopping Rules. Our main result, the Reduction Lemma, establishes the equivalence of these two subclasses of decision rules. Next, we introduce the notion of computability of decision rules using Turing machines and show that computable rules can be implemented using a simpler computational device - a finite automaton. We further show that computability of choice rules - an important subclass of decision rule - is implied by their continuity with respect to a natural topology. Finally, we introduce some natural choice procedures in our framework and provide their behavioral characterization.

Siddharth Chatterjee

University of Essex

QBS Conference Hub, Seminar Room 01.012