It is shown that a limitation of the various collation methods for paired comparison data currently available is their lack of validity when used in cases where the experiment is incomplete and particularly when the judgements are not replicated. Presented in this thesis is a reasonably thorough background to the method of paired comparisons and an overview of the existing methods for collating paired comparison data into a final ranking. As a result of the extensive review of existing collation methods, the thesis progresses logically to a new collation method that utilises all the available information from a set of pairwise preferences. The performance of the new collation method is extensively tested against existing methods by way of a simulation exercise which highlights the performance of the collation methods under different scenarios in terms of experiment size, experiment completeness and judgement consistency, as well as by considering the number of direct comparisons and the strength of competition. The new collation method and the existing collation method of Allen (1992) are applied to a set of real world data and the outcomes of the two methods are compared. The usefulness of paired comparisons in understanding the way judges use information to construct their own criteria when instructed to make preference decisions at a broad level is also considered and a real world application of this approach is performed. The main findings of this thesis are: „FƒnThe new methodology generally provides an improved performance when there are more than 10 objects to be ranked; „FƒnReplication of each pairwise judgement certainly improves the accuracy of the overall ranking, regardless of the level of judgement inconsistency; „FƒnIn the case of non-replication, the accuracy of the final ranking greatly improves as judgement consistency improves. In other words, if it is not possible to replicate individual pairwise judgements then high judgement consistency is important for a reasonable result; In the case of replication, the accuracy of the returned ranking improves with judgement consistency only in the case of the new method. For the existing methods, the accuracy actually decreases marginally with the improvement of judgement consistency, particularly if there is a low level of experiment completeness; In terms of experiment completeness, for non-replicated experiments, there is an increase in the accuracy of the returned ranking as the proportion of possible pairwise preferences completed increases, but not to the same extent as an increase in judgement consistency. That is, judgement consistency is actually more important than experiment completeness. This suggests that control over the design of the experiment (the extent of completeness and which pairwise preferences are completed) is less important than judgement consistency and replication ¡V certainly a finding not found reported in the literature; The new method outperforms the existing methods when there is perfect or very high judgement consistency.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Supervisor: Christine L. Duvauchelle. Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.

Five experiments with rats were conducted to determine the extent to which associative processes could be used to explain how rats seem able to learn complex CS-US contingencies during Pavlovian conditioning. Rats were exposed to positive, zero and negative CS-US contingencies and conditioned behaviour was compared with predictions derived from both associative models of conditioning and nonassociative normative theories of causal reasoning. A common measure of contingency, Deltap, when used to analyze Pavlovian conditioning requires defining the likelihood of the US in the presence and absence of the CS. Experiments 1 and 2 involved a novel preparation in which, in addition to standard CS presence trials, the absence of the CS was signalled by a second CS, called the trial marker (a lever). Rats were trained to learn relationships in which the CS was either a positive predictor of the US or in which it was unrelated to the US. More conditioned tray entries were observed when the CS signalled an increased likelihood of the US (positive contingency). Consistent with the associative explanations, the trial marker elicited conditioned lever pressing when the CS signalled no change in the likelihood of the US (zero contingency). Experiments 3, 4 and 5 extended the analysis with multiple CSs. These experiments examined whether learning about one CS was determined by its contingency relative to the contingency of other concurrently trained CSs. In experiments 3 and 4 conditioned responding to a moderately predictive CS was determined by its contingency relative to a perfectly predictive CS. Experiment 5 extended this effect to a case in which conditioning was influenced by the presence of a perfect predictor of the absence of the US. Together these results support the hypothesis that relative contingencies determine the strength of conditioned responding. The results are discussed from the perspective of both associative and nonassociative theory.

No description available.

No description available.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--University of Florida. / Description based on print version record. Typescript. Vita. Bibliography: leaves 67-70.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1975. / Vita. Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.