Related papers: Information, Utility & Bounded Rationality
Information is instrumental in our understanding of thermodynamics. Their interplay has been studied through completely degenerate Hamiltonians whereby the informational contributions to thermodynamic transformations can be isolated. In…
Autonomous exploration in mobile robotics often involves a trade-off between two objectives: maximizing environmental coverage and minimizing the total path length. In the widely used information gain paradigm, exploration is guided by the…
Decentralized resource allocation is a key problem for large-scale autonomic (or self-managing) computing systems. Motivated by a data center scenario, we explore efficient techniques for resolving resource conflicts via cooperative…
We consider the robust exponential utility maximization problem in discrete time: An investor maximizes the worst case expected exponential utility with respect to a family of nondominated probabilistic models of her endowment by…
We consider the problem of a decision-maker searching for information on multiple alternatives when information is learned on all alternatives simultaneously. The decision-maker has a running cost of searching for information, and has to…
We derive the optimal estimates of the free energies of an arbitrary number of thermodynamic states from nonequilibrium work measurements; the work data are collected from forward and reverse switching processes and obey a fluctuation…
Several recent results on thermodynamics have been obtained using the tools of quantum information theory and resource theories. So far, the resource theories utilised to describe thermodynamics have assumed the existence of an infinite…
The energy cost of computation has emerged as a central challenge at the intersection of physics and computer science. Recent advances in statistical physics -- particularly in stochastic thermodynamics -- enable precise characterizations…
We study a sender-receiver model in which the receiver can commit to a decision rule before the sender determines the information policy. The decision rule can depend on the information structure chosen by the sender and the realized…
This paper investigates optimal portfolio strategies in a financial market where the drift of the stock returns is driven by an unobserved Gaussian mean reverting process. Information on this process is obtained from observing stock returns…
Active states, from which work can be extracted by time-dependent perturbations, are an important resource for quantum thermodynamics in the absence of heat baths. Here we characterize this resource, establishing a resource theory that…
We consider an online resource allocation problem where multiple resources, each with an individual initial capacity, are available to serve random requests arriving sequentially over multiple discrete time periods. At each time period, one…
We propose a continuous-time nonlinear model of opinion dynamics with utility-maximizing agents connected via a social influence network. A distinguishing feature of the proposed model is the inclusion of an opinion-dependent…
Counterfactual utilities evaluate decisions not only by the realized outcome under a given decision, but also by the counterfactual outcomes that would arise under alternative decisions. By generalizing standard utility frameworks, they…
The intersection of causal inference and machine learning for decision-making is rapidly expanding, but the default decision criterion remains an \textit{average} of individual causal outcomes across a population. In practice, various…
Biological organisms are open, adaptve systems that can respond to changes in environment in specific ways. Adaptation and response can be posed as an optimization problem, with a tradeoff between the benefit obtained from a response and…
This paper studies an $\alpha$-robust utility maximization problem where an investor faces an intractable claim -- an exogenous contingent claim with known marginal distribution but unspecified dependence structure with financial market…
We study non-monetary mechanisms for the fair and efficient allocation of reusable public resources, i.e., resources used for varying durations. We consider settings where a limited resource is repeatedly shared among a set of agents, each…
We consider the economic problem of optimal consumption and investment with power utility. We study the optimal strategy as the relative risk aversion tends to infinity or to one. The convergence of the optimal consumption is obtained for…
This paper studies a one-sector optimal growth model with i.i.d. productivity shocks that are allowed to be unbounded. The utility function is assumed to be non-negative and unbounded from above. The novel feature in our framework is that…