AIMS AND SCOPE
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Vilfredo Pareto, a continuing, contentious legacy: Commemorating the centenary of Pareto’s death

“The foundation of political economy, and, in general of every social science, is evidently psychology. A day may come when we shall be able to decide the laws of social science from the principles of psychology […]” (Pareto, 1906, p. 35, En. tr.).

Celebrated by some and decried by others, Vilfredo Pareto’s place in modern economics and social analysis continues to arouse debates, controversies, but also ambivalences, especially with regard to subjects and methodologies. If neoclassical economists unarguably acclaim his preeminence within the standard approach to economics, while disputing and rebutting his breakthrough in economic sociology, other social scientists are quite outraged by some of his works, as well as his fairly impenetrable theories and epistemology. Though sometimes not fully understood and digested by much of the standard economics profession itself, Pareto is one of the few scientists still regarded as a classic in several areas of research in the social sciences, quantitative methods, engineering, social physics, and policy-making. In addition to economics, indeed, he is a classic of economic sociology, philosophy of science, political science, public finance, and statistics, just to mention some, with an extraordinary combination of scientific competencies and qualities (among others, see mainly Pareto, 1900, 1901a, 1901b, 1910; de Finetti, 1935; Davis, 1949; Fasiani, 1949; and Mirowski, 1989).

It is fitting to open this Call by highlighting the broader Pareto frontier and some references for the analysis eschewing and crossing sharp disciplinary boundaries with the scientific aim that is proper to Pareto, that is, to attempt bridging economics and the social world. If a reflection on the end of post-modernity and the beginning of the post-truth age could be elaborated by having an eye for economics and the substantive view of the economy, Vilfredo Pareto’s scientific thought would become a critical point of reference for the new generations of scholars and a must-read, particularly for those with a background in the social sciences. Although questionable and even idiosyncratic for some, Pareto (1892-3) contributes significantly to providing social scientists above all with methodological tools and meta-logical structures for understanding a complex and difficult-to-define reality: Consider, by way of example, the current stalemate in economic and social development which finds no solution either in socio-economic stimuli of the Keynesian type, or in favouring economic stability by targeting the growth rate of the money supply along with austerity measures and the related autopilot, due to the absence or scarcity of trust and for the abnormal effects generated by financial behaviour in recent decades (among other issues, see how fragmented and polarised the public sphere has become, as well as how market decisions are actually made—especially financial market decisions—and the subtle mechanisms that drive public opinion nowadays, operating at various levels and degrees of intensity).

In Pareto, indeed, the fundamental unit of analysis is human action, which leads him to formulate the theory of logical and non-logical actions, the former connect means with ends and are studied by economics, the latter, conversely, where such a connection does not exist being basically inspired by economic sociology, among other disciplines and areas of research. In other words, logical actions—which represent only a fraction of human actions—are those where the means are adequate to the ends both subjectively (for those who perform them) and objectively (for correctly informed external observers, i.e. scientists). Non-logical actions, however, are those in which both of these conditions are missing, or at least the second is missing, specifically objectivity. Therefore, non-logical does not mean illogical, i.e. lacking in any logic, but only a non-scientific means-ends nexus because it is not objective, that is, empirically and experimentally verifiable (see Pareto, 1906; 1935(1916); Bruni, 1999; and Bruni and Guala, 2001).

In this perspective, Pareto’s awareness of the spatio-temporal contingency of cognitive acquisitions emerges: Every goal achieved, and every piece of knowledge acquired is contextualised and shaped by the contingency of where and when it was achieved. The cognitive goals of the social sciences—towards the end of the nineteenth century, the clash over the methodology of economics was still alive and well—are so profoundly different from those of sciences such as physics and chemistry that Pareto manages to define the contours of a non-science. Based on Pareto’s scientific thought, non-logical actions are certainly the most numerous of those performed in many fields of life and are coloured with standard logic, sometimes instantiated in different logical structures and meanings, and enable them: They reflect the widespread way of thinking and acting of (boundedly rational) human beings, social and cultural conditioning, prejudices, values and beliefs (e.g., see Schumpeter, 1949; de Finetti, 1974; and Kirman, 1987, 1999).

Despite his excellent scientific production as an economist (e.g., see Pareto, 1896-7, 1897, 1906, 1911; see also Schumpeter, 1951), he begins to doubt conventional economic theory just like other distinguished contemporaries or thereabouts such as Marx, Veblen, Keynes, and Schumpeter (e.g., see Aspers, 2001; and Stiglitz, 2016) to name a few: This is emblematic of the growing distrust that is felt towards the normative appropriateness and effectiveness of the outcomes of the so-called standard economics, which fails to deliver entirely coherent indications of human action and interconnected knowledge frameworks and methodologies, being not plainly legible and intelligible at the very least. Maintaining its frameworks of understanding and methodologies seems to rely on selective information seeking and conveying, and on active avoidance of more efficient and practicable potential alternatives. Against this background, a Paretian commitment to accepting, indeed actively seeking, potentially disruptive knowledge that could change and extend the understanding of economics is the endeavour to eradicate the hedonistic assumption and replace it with the empirical (naked), observable fact of choice.

In order to highlight specific involvement in the Paretian framework, human reality cannot be reduced to production, trade, finance, and derivatives alone. In this vein, one of Pareto’s recurring argumentative themes is to claim that the construct theorised as “homo oeconomicus” does not actually subsist in the real market, while the theory of choice at the origin of economics reveals and originates the economics of welfare and collective choices and perhaps behavioural economics itself (see Thaler and Sunstein, 2008). From Walras’s equilibrium system, Pareto maintains a line of scientific inquiry, despite the disorder of his exposure, which involves examining human behaviour and leads to demonstrating that instinct and passions contribute to developing theories that have great importance in determining the shape of human societies (see Whitehead, 1925). His theory of equilibrium is still very topical in the contemporary debate, above all for the harsh criticism it has raised and, in some ways, for having rekindled a long-standing debate. Standard economics studies homo oeconomicus, an abstract individual who responds to the force of ophelimity—a neologism that Pareto derives from the Greek óphelimos to distinguish economic utility from utility understood as a characteristic that makes a thing or an experience something useful, good, or advantageous—as a measure of purely economic satisfaction or a relationship of convenience or, in other words, a question of marginal utility or the final degree of utility of Jevons and Walras’s rareté, expressing a relationship between a person and a thing, usually a commodity or intangible asset (see Schumpeter, 1949).

Rather than the abstract maximum of utility, therefore, ophelimity is a concept introduced by Pareto to develop ordinal utility theory based on the hypothesis that consumers are able to consistently classify different baskets of goods and services into ordinal orders according to preferences. Human beings, Pareto argues, however, generally perform non-logical actions, whose social actions are analysed as revealing social forms, as pre-rational orientations of real action. As stated in Pareto (1901), therefore, any human behaviour can be analysed starting from the action and its explanation, demonstration, and argumentation in which truth does not coincide with utility. Thus, it happens that a non-logical, untrue principle can be socially useful, while another, true logic can be harmful to the economy and society.

Pareto contributed enormously to detaching economic theory from the earlier prevailing paradigm by introducing the idea of ordinal utility theory. In any case, although in Pareto there remains an ambivalence regarding the concept of utility and its cardinal/ordinal measurement—demonstrating an emerging tension between his mathematical needs for generalisation and his empiricism and the related need for measurement—the entire theory of economic equilibrium can be constructed without the cardinal measurement of utility (essential hypothesis in the first generation of marginalist economists, from Jevons to Edgeworth, up to Pantaleoni), even without the concept of utility itself: In Pareto’s opinion, the empirical and observable fact of choice is enough, which actually reveals the preferences of consumers (see Bruni, 1999).

Economy and economics are thus reduced by Pareto to the study of only logical actions that human beings put in place to best satisfy their own interests. The only form of rationality allowed to homo oeconomicus is therefore the instrumental one; the only paradigm to be taken as a reference is that of Newtonian physics (similar reductions were not present in Pareto’s early work, starting with his well-known Cours d’économie politique (1896-7), in which, under the influence of Pantaleoni and Marshall, there were even hints and references to biology and evolutionary theory). Human beings and economic behaviour were still regarded in the flesh within the Cours; while in the Manuale di economia politica (1906) humans become material points, being able to even disappear once their “maps of indifference” are left to us.

Pareto’s economic ideas, therefore, postulate that economic agents would expect to maximise their preferences in a context characterised by the rarity of goods and the limited information available: Here rationality is instrumental in nature and finds its raison d’être in the coherence of the individual’s preferences hierarchical in an ordinal manner, by behavioural predispositions revealed through cultural universals. By emphasising Pareto’s commitment to engagement with preferences—i.e., certain states of mind which then really do cause choices—as the foundations of social sciences as a general rule, it is worth noting that in the social sciences, the concept of preference came to prominence for explanatory and predictive purposes with the methodological critiques of Irving Fisher (1892) and Vilfredo Pareto (1909) addressed to the cardinal utility theory along with its inner hedonistic hypothesis. Economic theory, and the theory of demand accordingly, had to be limited to what is strictly ascertainable and computable, hence the refusal of cardinal measurability.

A useful analogy, although by no means comprehensive of the reality of human motivations, might come from physics: At stake is the psychological element of the hedonistic theory of value threatened by Pareto who would like pure economics to be no different from rational mechanics, that is, to develop a mathematical logic of perfectly general systems (Jevons, too, claims economics in terms of the mechanics of utility and self-interest). Furthermore, it becomes seriously problematic to reconcile the theory of value with the theory of equilibrium, just as it becomes complicated to put the general equilibria together with the Marshallian ones. Earlier economists largely agreed that judgements and decisions were motivated and dominated by individuals’ pursuit of pleasure, and that the difference in the amount of pleasure derived from different alternatives was crucial to decision-making. In this framework, the concept of preference, to the extent that it has been used, stemmed simply from the hedonic utility: X is preferred to Y if X produces more utility than Y. Pareto argued that since an accurate procedure for measuring cardinal hedonic utility was not functional, social scientists should limit themselves to merely ordinal comparisons: This argument turned preferences into a major concept in the social sciences, supplanting (hedonistic) utility, and continues to be a thought-provoking subject for economists and other social scientists (e.g., see Mandler, 1999).

On top of that, the standard approach to economics radicalised Pareto’s idea by stating that cardinal utility would have to be ruled out to free economics from psychological hedonism (see Hicks and Allen, 1934). During the first decades of the twentieth century, however, the concept of preference retained a recognisable psychological content, according to which it assumed that people behave consciously and have preferences accordingly which are actually mental evaluations, rather than ex-post rationalisations of economic behaviour (see Lewin, 1996). When all is said and done, on the whole, Pareto efficiency symbolises the economic criterion: Collectively, a situation is optimal when it is impossible to increase one individual’s satisfaction without worsening someone else’s. Nevertheless, critical voices and policy action have pointed out that the maximisation of individual self-interest through the market cannot ensure the preservation of natural resources over time, and have advocated the introduction of extra-market mechanisms which are better positioned to address the idea of limits that are attached to entropy.

Following this line of reasoning and conscious of the challenges lying ahead in the scientific community and elsewhere, we wonder where have gone the Paretian mutual dependence between all phenomena and the inner motivations that hang over the search for the global maximum of individual utility/ophelimity, especially in times of persisting global crisis, growing risks, and the weakening of key public institutions. And, above all, what contemporary value does Pareto’s thought imply in terms of the ethics of institutions and individual and collective behaviours, as well as social responsibility and respect for the environment and common goods? Among other issues, this year’s Conference aims to critically examine the way in which Pareto was portrayed as an inspired and inspirational figure for the standard approach to economics, while also exploring the wider underlying theoretical and methodological elements of processes that shape contemporary economic decisions and uncertainty, problem-solving, and strategic analysis. Finally, at the most recent Conference on Decision Economics held at the University of L’Aquila in July 2022, several strong appeals were launched to favour further interdisciplinary approaches with different areas—especially social and cognitive areas—and connect different approaches. In this vein, DECON’s steering and organising committee invites proposals that consider these approaches as well, in addition to Pareto analysis. While the conference committee will give some preference to papers and panels that focuses on the centenary celebration of the death of Vilfredo Pareto and his multiple work products, it will also take into consideration papers and panels that engage topics concerned with economics, statistics, operations research, computer science, advanced mathematics, cognitive sciences, including business information systems, experimental research, modelling and simulation, decision analysis and uncertainty, algorithmic social sciences research, and cross-disciplinary related fields.

The above and some broader questions and issues about the intellectual forces operating in the development of scientific thought will be examined in the course of the conference together with the founding topics of DECON 2023.


TOPICS
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This year, too, the challenge is undoubtedly both theoretical and paradigmatic, but also rigorously methodological and empirically grounded as it applies to all aspects of the interdisciplinary Paretian methodological approach which concerns all fields of science, starting with economics and social structures, and spilling over into other fields of science. Therefore, just as Pareto’s scientific thought is a multifaceted, cross-disciplinary endeavour elaborated in a broad range of scientific fields, thus DECON 2023 suggests covering a range of topics to address this intrinsic ubiquity. Papers in the 2023 edition of Decision Economics are encouraged to support more interdisciplinary work accordingly. They may include, but not be limited to:

∘ The notion of measurement in utility theory, psychology, mathematics, and other areas of research;
∘ Value judgement within Pareto’s economic and / or sociological approaches to welfare;
∘ Mutually interacting particles moving from one equilibrium state to another: Myth, Pareto conjecture, or convention?
∘ Measuring justice in post-Paretian formulations of social justice: Primary goods and capabilities;
∘ Multiobjective optimum design methods and multicriteria decision-making methods;
∘ Pareto efficiency achieved even with large externalities: An argument against Pigouvian taxation?
∘ The idea of Pareto dominance as a second-order criterion: Reducing the cardinality of an already determined set of Nash equilibria;
∘ Pareto’s system analysis associated with Robert K. Merton and his attempts at functional analysis;
∘ Pareto efficiency as minimal criteria for defining social optimality: From standard economics to practitioners;
∘ Associations between environmental variables and the Pareto optimality: Evidence of constrained evolutionary responses;
∘ Pareto optimality under the sustainability eye: Trajectories in the global economy;
∘ From studying the Pareto optimality in economics and engineering (performance space) to exploring the trait space or morphospace in biological phenotype space;
∘ Bruno de Finetti’s (1974) different interpretation of Pareto optimality for a different approach to economics;
∘ Preferences as subjective evaluations of alternatives: Bundles of goods as vectors, household production functions;
∘ Pareto efficiency and the basic claims underlying economic analysis of law;
∘ Cognitive approaches to rationality: Instrumental rationality or capacity to choose?
∘ Multi-objective programming and its application in quantitative social and cognitive sciences;
∘ Trade-off optimal solutions or Pareto-optimal solutions: Review and advancements;
∘ General equilibrium or ever-changing structural stability? The emergence of the systemic or induced nature of economic crises;
∘ Resolving intergenerational conflicts over the environment under the Pareto criterion: Myth or reality?
∘ Representing the distribution of wealth: From Pareto analysis to cognitive sciences;
∘ “The new theories of economics”: Econophysics of income and wealth distributions;
∘ Preferences concept for explanatory and predictive purposes: Methodological criticisms of hedonistic cardinal utility;
∘ Pareto’s scholarly journey from economics to sociology: A one-way ticket;
∘ What are the relations between cooperative behaviour and Pareto optimality?
∘ Preference structure in data analysis and multiple objective linear programming;
∘ Games of partial information revolving around the concept of Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium;
∘ Evolutionary games versus optimality and Pareto dominance;
∘ Efficiency considerations or sufficiency aspects and social welfare functions: A fairy-tale ending?
∘ Expert systems with applications: Multi-objective optimisation problems;
∘ Modelling approaches to welfare economics, social choice theory, and theory of justice;
∘ Conceptualising and measuring well-being using statistical semantics and numerical rating scales;
∘ Pareto optimality in the landscape of global climate governance and the fiscal balance: Where do we stand?
∘ Number of outcomes in the Pareto-optimal set of discrete bargaining games: Replications and advancements;
∘ General equilibrium or ever-changing structural stability? The emergence of the systemic (or induced) nature of economic crises;
∘ Cognitive predicates of personal taste as linguistic devices used to convey perspectival information;
∘ Pareto-Nash equilibrium and its refinements: Asymmetries across players in social network formation;
∘ Representing distributions of wealth in a society: Gaussian curve versus Pareto’s exponential curve;
∘ Failing of the efficient market hypothesis because of homothetic properties and the market “memory”;
∘ Ranking of transitions as a psychologically plausible and scientifically legitimate way of preserving decreasing marginal utility vs. ranking as empirically unverifiable and superfluous to demand theory;
∘ Solving problems in engineering and sciences: Multi-objective evolution using evolutionary algorithms;
∘ Multi-attribute decision-making methods: Alternative objectives and solutions, and composite scores;
∘ Evaluating solutions in Pareto-based search-based software engineering;
∘ Meta-heuristic multi-objective search approaches: Gait generation and meta-heuristic algorithms;
∘ Failing of ideas surrounding the risk of financial operations within the randomness of market fluctuations and the normal distribution of returns;
∘ Economic policy views: Anti-metaphysics and irrationality;
∘ Analysing decision-making in process control: Multidisciplinary approaches to understanding human performance in complex tasks;
∘ Business model dynamics and change management: Cause and rationale of business decisions;
∘ Analysis of scientific thought: Perspective on Pareto’s scientific thought as a meta-theory;
∘ What economists and other social scientists have learned about dealing with Paretian variables and how they may drive future research progress;
∘ Heuristics and decision-making for a post-Paretian choice-centred view: A foregone conclusion?
∘ Understanding cooperative behaviour: Paretian framework vs. evolutionary models of cooperation;
∘ Paretian theory of ophelimity in closed and open cycles: Back to square one;
∘ Getting the upper hand: Cross-disciplinary nature of much modern statistical research;
∘ From Pareto-fronts representing the objective functions in scheduling problems to multi-objective workflow scheduling problem;
∘ Bell, book and candle: Reason, sentiment, and the rational-irrational dichotomy;
∘ Pareto’s idea of motivating sentiment as models and levels of aspirations and opportunity structure;
∘ Advancing microeconomics analysis: Meta-theoretical development in economics;
∘ Pareto’s value to contemporary political economy, institutional dynamics, and social theory;
∘ Paretian social evolution, social change, from an evolutionary perspective;
∘ Business model dynamics and change management: Pareto and fuzzy logic;
∘ Pareto sets with good convergence and diversity for developing industrial and engineering designs;
∘ A bolt from the blue: Cause and rationale of business behaviour and business decisions;
∘ Coping with decisions and uncertainty: A post-neoclassical decision-making perspective;
∘ Evolving concepts of optimality in strategic games: Multi-agent systems and Pareto joint strategies;
∘ Economies as dynamic evolving systems: Paces and characters of change;
∘ What is the point of efficiency? On the commons approach to market failures;
∘ Simultaneous choices of maximal pure strategies: Equilibrium points in games with vector payoffs;
∘ Ordinal preferences over outcomes: Individual boundedly rational agents and n-person coalitions;
∘ Statistical semantics: Describing and measuring social phenomena through natural language;
∘ Applying statistics in social research: Cognitive aspects of naturally occurring (big) data;
∘ Optimality or efficiency in applied mathematics and computer science concerned with decision making;
∘ Cross-disciplinary research across multiple Paretian disparate fields: Problems facing the behavioural and social sciences;
∘ Modelling multi-agent constraint systems with preferences as soft constraint systems with variables and constraints distributed among multiple autonomous agents;
∘ Against Paretianism: A wealth creation approach to business ethics and ethical decision-making;
∘ Pareto’s probability distributions: A forerunner of the quantum approach to economics?

These and related questions will be addressed within DECON 2023 by discussing the relevant contributions and insights in the field. Originated in 2015, DECON embodies original and comparative research, as well as annual follow-up assessments on decision-making and economics involving several international research institutions and over two hundred authors and academic departments. In the continuing spirit of international cooperation, the steering and organising Committee of DECON issues this Call for Papers which will culminate in the annual three-day Symposium to be held in hybrid form at the University of Minho, Guimarães (Portugal).

References

∙ Aspers, P. (2001). Crossing the boundary of economics and sociology. The case of Vilfredo Pareto. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 60(2), 519-545.
∙ Bruni, L. (1999). Vilfredo Pareto. Alle radici della scienza economica del Novecento. Firenze: Publistampa. En. tr. (2002): Vilfredo Pareto and the birth of modern microeconomics. Cheltenham: Elgar.
∙ Bruni, L., and Guala, F. (2001). Vilfredo Pareto and the epistemological foundations of choice theory. History of Political Economy, 33(1), 21-49.
∙ Davis, H. T. (1949). Pareto statistico. Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia, 8(3/4), 199-206.
∙ de Finetti, B. (1935). Vilfredo Pareto di fronte ai suoi critici odierni. Nuovi Studi di Diritto, Economia e Politica, 8(4-6), 225-244.
∙ de Finetti, B. (1974). Report: Pareto optimum in a different approach to economics. Theory and Decision, 5, 343-344.
∙ Fasiani, M. (1949). Contributi di Pareto alla scienza delle finanze. Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia, 8(3/4), 129-173.
∙ Hicks, J.R., and Allen, R.G.D. (1934). A reconsideration of the theory of value. Economica, Part I, 1(1), 52-76; Part II, 1(2), 196-219.
∙ Kirman, A. (1987). Pareto as an Economist. New Palgrave Dictionary of Political Economy, Vol. IV, 804-809.
∙ Kirman, A. (1999). Vilfredo Pareto. In F. Meacci (Ed.), Italian Economist of 20th Century: Cheltenham, Elgar.
∙ Lewin, S.B. (1996). Economics and psychology: Lessons for our own day from the early twentieth century. Journal of Economic Literature,34(3), 1293-1323.
∙ Mandler, M. (1999). Dilemmas in economic theory: Persisting foundational problems of microeconomics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
∙ Mirowski, P. (1989). More heat than light: Economics as social physics, physics as nature’s economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
∙ Pareto, V. (1892-3). Considerazioni sui principi fondamentali dell’ economia politica pura. Giornale degli Economisti e Annali di Economia, (2), 4 (May 1892), 389-420; 4 (June 1892), 485-512; 5 (August 1892), 119-157; 6 (January 1893), 1-37; 7 (October 1893), 279-321.
∙ Pareto, V. (1896-7). Cours d’économie politique proféssé à l’Université de Lausanne. 2 Vol., Lausanne: Rouge.
∙ Pareto, V. (1897). The new theories of economics. Journal of Political Economy, 5(4), 485-502.
∙ Pareto, V. (1900). Sul fenomeno economico. Lettera a Benedetto Croce. Giornale degli Economisti, XXI, 139-162.
∙ Pareto, V. (1901a). Sul principio economico. Lettera a Benedetto Croce. Giornale degli Economisti, XXII, 131-138.
∙ Pareto, V. (1901b). Le nuove teorie economiche. Appunti. Giornale degli Economisti, XXIII, 235-259.
∙ Pareto, V. (1906). Manuale di economia politica con una introduzione alla scienza sociale. Milano: Società Editrice Libraria (Manuel d’économie politique. Traduit sur l’édition italienne par Alfred Bonnet—revue par l’auteur—Paris: Giard et Brière, 1909).
∙ Pareto, V. (2010). Le mie idee (A proposito dell’articolo di Enrico Leone). Il Divenire Sociale, VI(14), 194-196.
∙ Pareto, V. (1911). Économie mathématique. Encyclopédie des sciences mathématiques pures et appliquées, Tome 1, Vol. 4, Paris: Gauthier-Villars.
∙ Pareto, V. (1916). Trattato di sociologia generale, 2 Volumes. Firenze: Barbera. En. tr. (1935), The mind and the society: A treatise on general sociology. New York: Harcourt Brace.
∙ Samuelson, P. A. (1937). A note on measurement of utility. Review of Economic Studies, 4(2), 155-161.
∙ Schumpeter, J.A. (1949). Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923). Quarterly Journal of Economics, 63(2), 147-173.
∙ Schumpeter, J.A. (1951). Ten great economists, from Marx to Keynes. New York: Oxford University Press.
∙ Shapley, L.S. (1959). Equilibrium points in games with vector payoffs. Naval Research Logistics Quaterly, 1, 57-61.
∙ Stiglitz, J.E. (2016). Rewriting the rules of the American economy: An agenda for growth and shared prosperity. New York: W.W. Norton.
∙ Thaler, R.H., and Sunstein, C.R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
∙ Whitehead, A. N. (1925). Science and the modern world: Lowell lectures, 1925. New York: Macmillan.
∙ Wicksteed, H. P. (1906). Pareto. Manuale di economia politica, con una introduzione alla scienza sociale. Review of Pareto’s manuale di economia politica. The Economic Journal, 16(64), 553-557.

* Given the topicality of Pareto’s thought, the verbs included in this Call are intentionally conjugated in the historical present.




SPECIAL SESSIONS
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Special sessions are also planned to enable insights into economics, decision-making, and related subjects. They will represent further highlights of the fifth edition of Decision Economics by connecting a dynamic and interdisciplinary group of researchers to the Conference:

(1) “AI-driven Decision Making” (AIDM) is an immersive special session organised and coordinated by Stefano Za, Michele Cipriano, and Marco Smacchia (University of Chieti-Pescara, Italy).

(2) “Decision Economics and the Economy of Francesco” (DEEF) is a novel special session organised and coordinated by Tony E. Persico (Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States).



KEYNOTE LECTURES
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Following an inaugural address by the President-elect, two distinguished scholars will deliver keynote lectures.




AWARDS, SOCIAL COMMITMENT, AND PUBLICATION OPPORTUNITIES
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Finally, catered towards the relevant scientific and scholarly community, this year, too, the permanent Scientific Committee of DECON will award the best paper prize and the best paper application prize—together with the prizes awarded by the MDPI international publishing house. In this regard, particular attention will be paid to those manuscripts involving one or more research efforts, such as the methodological rigour and soundness of research, theoretical relevance, analytical accuracy and potential field contamination, including the quality of the study design, implementation, analysis as well as strength of evidence, with the appropriate differentiations between the two main sections of the prize. As in earlier years, this year too DECON facilitates cross-fertilisation between theories, methodologies, and applications of decision-making and mathematical foundations of economics. All accepted papers will be included in a peer-reviewed special book indexed by Scopus. Each author who submits her paper undertakes to comply with the required scientific rigour and to provide timely feedback to the Steering and Organising Committee and the Managing Editor in charge.

Additionally, DECON’s founders have made a proposal for a special issue on “Reframing Pareto efficiency as a tool for assessing socio-economic circumstances, not the ultimate goal.” to the Editorial Board of ‘New Mathematics and Natural Computation’, a peer-reviewed international scientific journal founded in 2005 and now published by World Scientific Publishing. The proposal has been approved, thus, participants in DECON 2023 will have the opportunity to submit their extended papers for consideration in it, following the instructions that will be communicated in due course. Should one or more modifications become necessary, the Committee reserves the opportunity to modify the contents of this Call at its discretion and without notice, in accordance with international academic and professional standards.



STEERING AND ORGANISING COMMITTEE
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Despite DECON 2023 being hosted by the World Heritage Site of Guimarães—because of its historic centre, which has retained its original appearance—within the local University of Minho on 12th – 14th July 2023, it was planned to hold the Conference in hybrid mode, both on-site and on-line/remotely. Recorded presentations will also be allowed, too. For further information or to find out more, please get in touch with the DECON Secretariat at (info@decision-economics.net) and visit https://www.decision-economics.net.



FORMAT
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The authors of all submitted papers are required to format their work according to the standard template, with a maximum length of 10 pages (minimun 4 pages) including figures and references:
Microsoft word format.
LaTeX Format.




SUBMISSION
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All proposed papers must be submitted in electronic form (PDF format) using the DECON 2023 conference management system.




CURRENT MAIN DEADLINES
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Submissions: 5th June 2023
Final Notification: 16th June 2023
Camera-ready: 10th July 2023
Conference celebration: 12th-14th July 2023




ORGANIZERS
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University of Minho (Portugal)

LASI - Intelligent Systems Associate Laboratory (Portugal)

University of Chieti-Pescara (Italy)

National Chengchi University, Taipei (Taiwan)

University of Salamanca (Spain)




SPONSORS
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AIR INSTITUTE
INDRA




SUPPORT FROM NATIONAL ASSOCIATIONS
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AEPIA
APPIA