Function (engineering)

Abstract: Commodities and Capabilities presents a set of inter-related theses concerning the foundations of welfare economics, and in particular about the assessment of personal well-being and advantage. The argument presented focuses on the capability to function, i.e. what a person can do or can be, questioning in the process the more standard emphasis on opulence or on utility. In fact, a person's motivation behind choice is treated here as a parametric variable which may or may not coincide with the pursuit of self-interest. Given the large number of practical problems arising from the roles and limitations of different concepts of interest and the judgement of advantage and well-being, this scholarly investigation is both of theoretical interest and practical import.

Abstract: Relying on a Bayesian-like framework, the authors develop a behavioral process model of perceived service quality. Perceptions of the dimensions of service quality are viewed to be a function of a ...

Abstract: We consider learning in a Markov decision process where we are not explicitly given a reward function, but where instead we can observe an expert demonstrating the task that we want to learn to perform. This setting is useful in applications (such as the task of driving) where it may be difficult to write down an explicit reward function specifying exactly how different desiderata should be traded off. We think of the expert as trying to maximize a reward function that is expressible as a linear combination of known features, and give an algorithm for learning the task demonstrated by the expert. Our algorithm is based on using "inverse reinforcement learning" to try to recover the unknown reward function. We show that our algorithm terminates in a small number of iterations, and that even though we may never recover the expert's reward function, the policy output by the algorithm will attain performance close to that of the expert, where here performance is measured with respect to the expert's unknown reward function.

Abstract: Most economic theorists have embraced the principle that certain kinds of education—the three R's, vocational training, and higher education—equip a man to perform certain jobs or functions, or enable a man to perform a given function more effectively. The principle seems a sound one. Underlying it, perhaps, is the theory that education enhances one's ability to receive, decode, and understand information, and that information processing and interpretation is important for performing or learning to perform many jobs. This chapter focuses on the economic growth theory, which has concentrated on the role of education as it relates to the completely routinized job. In its usual, rather general form, the theory postulates a production function which states how maximum current output depends upon the current services of tangible capital goods, the current number of men performing each of these jobs, the current educational attainments of each of these jobholders and time.