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LLMs are increasingly used to make or support high-stakes decisions under uncertainty, where alignment depends not only on factual accuracy but on how models weigh tradeoffs between different outcomes. We present an empirical pipeline for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Khurram Yamin , Jingjing Tang , Eric Horvitz , Bryan Wilder

Computation plays a major role in decision making. Even if an agent is willing to ascribe a probability to all states and a utility to all outcomes, and maximize expected utility, doing so might present serious computational problems.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-06-15 Joseph Y. Halpern , Rafael Pass

A family of models of individual discrete choice are constructed by means of statistical averaging of choices made by a subject in a reinforcement learning process, where the subject has short, k-term memory span. The choice probabilities…

Econometrics · Economics 2019-08-20 Misha Perepelitsa

The Availability bias, manifested in the over-representation of extreme eventualities in decision-making, is a well-known cognitive bias, and is generally taken as evidence of human irrationality. In this work, we present the first…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2018-01-31 Ardavan S. Nobandegani , Kevin da Silva Castanheira , A. Ross Otto , Thomas R. Shultz

Restricting individuals' access to some opportunities may steer their desire toward their substitutes, a phenomenon known as the forbidden fruit effect. We axiomatize a choice model named restriction-sensitive choice (RSC), which…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-18 Niels Boissonnet , Alexis Ghersengorin

We model the behavioral biases of human decision-making in securing interdependent systems and show that such behavioral decision-making leads to a suboptimal pattern of resource allocation compared to non-behavioral (rational)…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-11-25 Mustafa Abdallah , Daniel Woods , Parinaz Naghizadeh , Issa Khalil , Timothy Cason , Shreyas Sundaram , Saurabh Bagchi

This paper presents a model of costly information acquisition where decision-makers can choose whether to elaborate information superficially or precisely. The former action is costless, while the latter entails a processing cost. Within…

General Economics · Economics 2024-11-27 Federico Vaccari

The issue of whether we make decisions freely has vexed philosophers for millennia, Resolving this is vital for solving a diverse range of problems, from the physiology of how the brain makes decisions (and how we assign moral…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2025-06-30 Tim Palmer

Motivated by several classic decision-theoretic paradoxes, and by analogies with the paradoxes which in physics motivated the development of quantum mechanics, we introduce a projective generalization of expected utility along the lines of…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-01-18 Pierfrancesco La Mura

Empirical evidence shows that human behaviour often deviates from game-theoretical rationality. For instance, humans may hold unrealistic expectations about future outcomes. As the evolutionary roots of such biases remain unclear, we…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-08-29 Marco Saponara , Elias Fernandez Domingos , Jorge M. Pacheco , Tom Lenaerts

Despite the explosive growth of AI and the technologies built upon it, predicting and inferring the sub-optimal behavior of users or human collaborators remains a critical challenge. In many cases, such behaviors are not a result of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Yifan Zhu , Sammie Katt , Samuel Kaski

We present a representation of partial confidence in belief and preference that is consistent with the tenets of decision-theory. The fundamental insight underlying the representation is that if a person is not completely confident in a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-11 David Heckerman , Holly B. Jimison

Causal analysis may be affected by selection bias, which is defined as the systematic exclusion of data from a certain subpopulation. Previous work in this area focused on the derivation of identifiability conditions. We propose instead a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-03 Marco Zaffalon , Alessandro Antonucci , Rafael Cabañas , David Huber , Dario Azzimonti

A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people's susceptibility to persuasion -- the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2018-01-29 Rediet Abebe , Jon Kleinberg , David Parkes , Charalampos E. Tsourakakis

Reasoning Large Language Models (LLMs) enable test-time scaling, with dataset-level accuracy improving as the token budget increases, motivating adaptive reasoning -- spending tokens when they improve reliability and stopping early when…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-15 Xi Wang , Anushri Suresh , Alvin Zhang , Rishi More , William Jurayj , Benjamin Van Durme , Mehrdad Farajtabar , Daniel Khashabi , Eric Nalisnick

We provide an economic interpretation of the practice consisting in incorporating risk measures as constraints in a classic expected return maximization problem. For what we call the infimum of expectations class of risk measures, we show…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2009-06-19 Laetitia Andrieu , Michel De Lara , Babacar Seck

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…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2021-07-21 Nicole Bäuerle , Anna Jaśkiewicz

The aim of this paper is to propose a generalization of previous approaches in qualitative decision making. Our work is based on the binary possibilistic utility (PU), which is a possibilistic counterpart of Expected Utility (EU).We first…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-07-09 Paul Weng

Standard rational actor models often attribute cooperation failures in social dilemmas to insufficient incentives, overlooking the destabilizing effects of continuous utility maximization. To address this, we propose a framework of ``will"…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-05-12 Yizhe Huang , Bin Ling , Song-Chun Zhu , Xue Feng

Perfectly rational decision-makers maximize expected utility, but crucially ignore the resource costs incurred when determining optimal actions. Here we employ an axiomatic framework for bounded rational decision-making based on a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-07-29 Pedro A. Ortega , Daniel A. Braun