Great Expectations. Part I: On the Customizability of Generalized Expected Utility
Artificial Intelligence
2007-05-23 v1
Abstract
We propose a generalization of expected utility that we call generalized EU (GEU), where a decision maker's beliefs are represented by plausibility measures, and the decision maker's tastes are represented by general (i.e.,not necessarily real-valued) utility functions. We show that every agent, ``rational'' or not, can be modeled as a GEU maximizer. We then show that we can customize GEU by selectively imposing just the constraints we want. In particular, we show how each of Savage's postulates corresponds to constraints on GEU.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.cs/0311026,
title = {Great Expectations. Part I: On the Customizability of Generalized Expected Utility},
author = {Francis C. Chu and Joseph Y. Halpern},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cs/0311026},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
Preliminary version appears in Proc. 18th International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI), 2003, pp. 291-296