No description available.

No description available.

This thesis consists of three essays. In Precautionary Saving under Correlated Risk, I show that the sign of the correlation between the random variables might determine whether saving increases or decreases when risk is introduced. Precautionary saving is thus not confirmed. In the second part of this chapter, the consumer must also allocate her saving between an insurance and an interest-bearing asset. It is shown that switching the sign of correlation changes the optimal insurance ratio and probably also optimal saving. Saving and Portfolio Choice by Mutually Altruistic Consumers treats the effects of mutual altruism between two individuals. Compared to the Utilitarian social optimum there is, on the one hand, a tendency to higher saving and lower risk share resulting from the higher uncertainty of future income in the Nash equilibrium. On the other hand, there is a tendency to lower saving and higher risk share arising from the possibility of a free ride on the generosity of others, named "Samaritan's Dilemma". Analytically, it was not possible to determine the size or the direction of divergences in the choice variables. Numerical examples show that the effect of the Samaritan's Dilemma outweighs the effect of the greater uncertainty of future income in the Nash equilibrium. However, the divergence in saving between the two solutions is rather small. In the literature, uncertain lifetime has been used to explain both unexpectedly low and unexpectedly high saving by the elderly. In The Effect of Uncertain Lifetime on the Saving of the Elderly, risk is introduced into the remaining lifetime and the consequences of a background risk are investigated. Introducing uncertain lifetime into the certainty model results in a slower decumulation of wealth from the date of retirement. On the contrary, introducing uncertain lifetime into a model with uncertain investment income results in a swifter decumulation and an earlier depletion of wealth.

We propose and investigate several new principles of rational reasoning within the framework of Pure Inductive Logic, PIL, where probability functions defined on the sentences of a first-order language are used to model an agent's beliefs. The Elephant Principle is concerned with how learning, modelled by conditioning, may be uniquely `remembered'. The Perspective Principle requires that, from a given prior, conditioning on statistically similar experiences should result in similar assignments, and is found to be a necessary condition for Reichenbach's Axiom to hold. The Abductive Inference Principle and some variations are proposed as possible formulations of a restriction of C.S. Peirce's notion of hypothesis in the context of PIL, though characterization results obtained for these principles suggest that they may be too strong. The Finite Values Property holds when a probability function takes only finitely many values when restricted to sentences containing only constant symbols from some fixed finite set. This is shown to entail a certain systematic method of assigning probabilities in terms of possible worlds, and it is considered in this light as a possible principle of inductive reasoning. Classification results are given, stating which members of certain established families of probability functions satisfy each of these new principles. Additionally, we define the theory of a principle P of PIL to be the set of those sentences which are assigned probability 1 by every probability function which satisfies P. We investigate the theory of the established principle of Spectrum Exchangeability by finding separately the theories of heterogeneous and homogeneous functions. The theory of Spectrum Exchangeability is found to be equal to the theory of finite structures. The theory of Johnson's Sufficientness Postulate is also found. Consequently, we find that Spectrum Exchangeability, Johnson's Sufficientness Postulate and the Finite Values Property are all inconsistent with the principle of Super-Regularity: that any consistent sentence should be assigned non-zero probability.

When focusing on the general area of data mining, high-utility itemset mining (HUIM) can be defined as an offset of frequent itemset mining (FIM). It is known to emphasize more factors critically, which gives HUIM its intrinsic edge. Due to the flourishing development of the IoT technique, the uncertainty patterns mining is also attractive. Potential high-utility itemset mining (PHUIM) is introduced to reveal valuable patterns in an uncertainty database. Unfortunately, even though the previous methods are all very effective and powerful to mine, the potential high-utility itemsets quickly. These algorithms are not specifically designed for a database with an enormous number of records. In the previous methods, uncertainty transaction datasets would be load in the memory ultimately. Usually, several pre-defined operators would be applied to modify the original dataset to reduce the seeking time for scanning the data. However, it is impracticable to apply the same way in a big-data dataset. In this work, a dataset is assumed to be too big to be loaded directly into memory and be duplicated or modified; then, a MapReduce framework is proposed that can be used to handle these types of situations. One of our main objectives is to attempt to reduce the frequency of dataset scans while still maximizing the parallelization of all processes. Through in-depth experimental results, the proposed Hadoop algorithm is shown to perform strongly to mine all of the potential high-utility itemsets in a big-data dataset and shows excellent performance in a Hadoop computing cluster.

Arrow et al. (1993) issued guidelines for contingent valuation, one of which was the recommendation that valuation questions include a ‘no-answer’ option such as ‘I prefer not to vote (PNV)’ in addition to the typical ‘yes’ and ‘no’ options. However, they did not give further guidelines on what to do with such responses, and there are various opinions in the literature. The objective of this thesis was to identify factors that affect the probability of a respondent choosing the PNV option in stated preference surveys. This thesis identified a positive relationship between offered bid for the proposed environmental project and the probability of respondents choosing PNV and a negative relationship between perceived consequentiality of the survey and the probability of respondents choosing PNV. From the findings, this thesis suggests possible solutions to reduce the frequency of such responses in order to increase accuracy of welfare estimates and cost efficiency.

In his book, Does God Exist?, Hans Küng proposes an alternative to nihilism, namely fundamental trust or "Yes to Reality". Through a detailed study of Küng's interpretation of nihilism and his alternative to nihilism, I discuss whether Küng can help people to find a way out in face of the challenge of nihilism, as predicted by Friedrich Nietzsche. I conclude that fundamental trust still cannot be a more convincing choice than nihilism for those people who do not believe that there is a fundamental identity, meaningfulness and value of reality, and for those who cannot experience the being of this uncertain reality, even if they venture out in trust. In my opinion, Küng is not very successful in convincing people that fundamental trust rather than nihilism is the right option for them. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.