Choice in ordered-tree-based decision problems

Saptarshi Mukherjee ()

Social Choice and Welfare, 2014, vol. 43, issue 2, 496 pages

Abstract: Decision makers often have to choose alternatives which appear in an exogenous structure. For example, consider choosing a dish in a restaurant after going through different menu cards (a menu card for buffet, another for combo offers etc.). The decision maker observes the items displayed (as a list) on a menu card and she switches to another menu card to see the items displayed on it (again in the form of another list). Thus the set of all items appears as an “ordered-tree” to the decision maker. There are other examples of decision making where alternatives appear in the form of an ordered-tree. In this paper we consider the cases of choice from ordered-trees (in particular, “lists of lists”) and characterize the choice functions. We impose the axioms of Backward Consistency and Replacement Indifference on choice functions and obtain characterization results for $$k$$ k -ary ordered-trees and more general ordered-trees. We show that the results for $$k=2$$ k = 2 are similar to those of (Rubinstein and Salant 2006 ), in which the cases of choice from lists are considered. However the results for $$k \ge 3$$ k ≥ 3 and general ordered-trees are different and allow for instance, a richer class of tie-breaking rules in special cases. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-013-0778-3 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:43:y:2014:i:2:p:471-496

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-013-0778-3

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().