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Revealed Preference Argumentation and Applications in Consumer Behaviour Analyses

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Book cover Multi-Agent Systems (EUMAS 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 12802))

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Abstract

Consumer preference studies in economics rest heavily on the behavioural interpretation of preference especially in the form of Revealed Preference Theory (RPT). Viewing purchasing decisions as a species of human reasoning, in this paper we are interested in generalising behaviourism to preference-based argumentation where existing frameworks are universally governed by the opposing mentalistic interpretation of preference. Concretely we re-construct and unify two main approaches to RPT then develop a so-called Revealed Preference Argumentation (RPA) framework which identifies preference as observed reasoning behaviour of an agent. We show that RPA subsumes RPT, by showing that key RPT-based consumer analyses can be translated to and solved as RPA computational tasks. It is argued that RPA may pave the way for future applications of argumentation to behavioural economics.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Intransitive preference, though seems odd, is not uncommon, see e.g. [25].

  2. 2.

    Intuitively, a weak preference of x over y is to mean “x is at least as good as y” while a strict one means “x is strictly better than y”.

  3. 3.

    aka preference-based argumentation in [1, 3, 5, 6, 14].

  4. 4.

    We do not impose any constraints on P except that it is a binary relation over \(\mathcal Arg\).

  5. 5.

    A complete extension contains all sub-arguments of its arguments.

  6. 6.

    The set of conclusions of arguments in a complete extension is consistent.

  7. 7.

    A choice c is decisive if \(c(B) \ne \emptyset \) for any menu \(B \in \mathcal B\).

  8. 8.

    For an illustration let’s borrow an example from [30]. An economist and her friend visit a sushi restaurant for the first time. The economist has read about wasabi and knows what it looks like. Her friend mistakes it for avocado and devours a whole spoonful. That is, the friend was observed to choose wasabi but did not have an argument for choosing it. If the economist models her friend’s choice options as “eating a spoonful of wasabi” and “not doing that”, then as a revealed preference theorist, she will conclude that her friend prefers “eating a spoonful of wasabi” to “not doing that”, which is obviously wrong.

  9. 9.

    Recall that a regular preference relation is either a regular-weak preference relation or regular-strict preference relation (Definition 3).

  10. 10.

    Recall that for an argument preference relation Q, \(\mathcal R_Q \triangleq \{(x,y) \mid (arg_x, arg_y) \in Q\}\) denotes the corresponding preference relation over options.

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Acknowledgment

Nguyen Duy Hung is supported by Center of Excellence in Intelligent Informatics, Speech and Language Technology and Service Innovation (CILS), and Intelligent Informatics and Service Innovation (IISI) Research Center of Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology; Van-Nam Huynh is supported by the US Office of Naval Research Global (ONRG, Grant No. N62909-19-1-2031).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Sirindhorn International Institute of Technology, Pathumthani, Thailand

    Nguyen Duy Hung

  2. Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi, Japan

    Van-Nam Huynh

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  1. Nguyen Duy Hung
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Correspondence to Nguyen Duy Hung .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Ariel Rosenfeld

  2. Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Be’er Sheva, Israel

    Nimrod Talmon

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Hung, N.D., Huynh, VN. (2021). Revealed Preference Argumentation and Applications in Consumer Behaviour Analyses. In: Rosenfeld, A., Talmon, N. (eds) Multi-Agent Systems. EUMAS 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12802. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82254-5_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82254-5_4

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