Integrated preference argumentation and applications in consumer behaviour analyses

• Published in: International journal of approximate reasoning Vol. 159; p. 108938
• Main Authors: Nguyen Duy, Hung, Huynh, Van-Nam
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.08.2023
• Subjects: Argumentation; Consumer behaviour analyses; Economic rationalities; Integrated preference; Revealed preference; Revealed preference; Argumentation; Integrated preference; Economic rationalities; Consumer behaviour analyses
• ISSN: 0888-613X; 1873-4731
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ijar.2023.108938

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 kind of human reasoning, in this paper we are interested in generalising behaviourism to preference-based argumentation where existing frameworks are arguably governed by the opposing mentalistic interpretation of preference. Concretely our contributions are three-fold. First we re-construct and unify two main approaches to RPT in argumentation terms by developing a Revealed Preference Argumentation (RPA) framework. We show that key RPT-based consumer analyses such as different rationality checks of a consumer behaviour and various kinds of such behaviour's extrapolations can be translated to computational tasks in RPA. RPA is in turn subsumed by the second contribution - an Integrated Preference Argumentation (IPA) framework which fully integrates mentalism and behaviourism. In particular we show that RPA is just a special case of IPA with only revealed preference, while existing preference-based argumentation frameworks can be viewed as IPA frameworks with only stated preference. As the third contribution, we develop a complete set of IPA algorithms and establish their correctness and termination for a general class of IPA frameworks. For demonstration we implement the algorithms in Prolog to obtain an IPA reasoning engine and test the engine with various RPT-based consumer behaviour analyses. In sum, it is argued that the current paper provides not only a theory of Integrated Preference Argumentation, but also a related development tool for future applications of argumentation to behavioural economics - a largely unexplored area so far though Dung used the stable marriage problem in microeconomic game theory to partly motivate the argumentation theory.