Modeling Irrational Consumer Behaviors with Cognitive Maps : An Outline of a Framework

摘要

Decision making processes are in the core of many sciences, including psychology, economics, sociology, information sciences, mathematics and others. Understanding mechanisms of these processes and modeling human decision processes is extremely important, especially from the point of view of economics. Consumer, the main subject of the market game, makes choices that influence not only his own environment, but also prosperity of other entities. In this paper, we present a preliminary investigation on computational models of decision making that take into account irrationality of human beings. The ultimate goal of the planned research is to prepare a new, not yet present in the theory of economics, consumer behavior model, which is rooted in the theory of human needs. We aim at constructing a model of a consumer, which allows to depict knowledge at different generalization levels. We address the necessity for the following elements in the model: aggregation operators, fitted similarity measure, knowledge space structuring, and Cognitive Maps. The originality and innovativeness of this approach to consumer decision making lies in its interdisciplinary character.