Related papers: Impartial utilitarianism on infinite utility strea…
Decision theory does not traditionally include uncertainty over utility functions. We argue that the a person's utility value for a given outcome can be treated as we treat other domain attributes: as a random variable with a density…
Many fairness criteria constrain the policy or choice of predictors, which can have unwanted consequences, in particular, when optimizing the policy under such constraints. Here, we advocate to instead focus on the utility function the…
A model for decision making that generalizes Expected Utility Maximization is presented. This model, Expected Qualitative Utility Maximization, encompasses the Maximin criterion. It relaxes both the Independence and the Continuity…
We consider social welfare functions when the preferences of individual agents and society maximize subjective expected utility in the tradition of Savage. A system of axioms is introduced whose unique solution is the social welfare…
We consider the problem of rate and power allocation in a fading multiple-access channel. Our objective is to obtain rate and power allocation policies that maximize a utility function defined over average transmission rates. In contrast…
The maximum entropy principle can be used to assign utility values when only partial information is available about the decision maker's preferences. In order to obtain such utility values it is necessary to establish an analogy between…
We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…
Medical "Crisis Standards of Care" call for a utilitarian allocation of scarce resources in emergencies, while favoring the worst-off under normal conditions. Inspired by such triage rules, we introduce social welfare functions whose…
In this work we generalize standard Decision Theory by assuming that two outcomes can also be incomparable. Two motivating scenarios show how incomparability may be helpful to represent those situations where, due to lack of information,…
We study reasoning with existential rules to perform query answering over streams of data. On static databases, this problem has been widely studied, but its extension to rapidly changing data has not yet been considered. To bridge this…
We study the subtlety of optimal paternalism when a utilitarian planner has the power to design a discrete choice set for a heterogeneous population with bounded rationality. We first consider the planning problem in abstraction. We show…
We study the dual formulation of the utility maximization problem in incomplete markets when the utility function is finitely valued on the whole real line. We extend the existing results in this literature in two directions. First, we…
We consider a sequence of repeated interactions between an agent and an environment. Uncertainty about the environment is captured by a probability distribution over a space of hypotheses, which includes all computable functions. Given a…
Expected Utility: Algebraic Expected Utility In this paper, we provide two axiomatizations of algebraic expected utility, which is a particular generalized expected utility, in a von Neumann-Morgenstern setting, i.e. uncertainty…
Standard optimal growth models implicitly impose a ``perpetual existence'' constraint, which can ethically justify infinite misery in stagnant economies. This paper investigates the optimal longevity of a dynasty within a Critical-Level…
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…
According to the proportional allocation mechanism from the network optimization literature, users compete for a divisible resource -- such as bandwidth -- by submitting bids. The mechanism allocates to each user a fraction of the resource…
We introduce a linear space of finitely additive measures to treat the problem of optimal expected utility from consumption under a stochastic clock and an unbounded random endowment process. In this way we establish existence and…
Border's theorem gives an intuitive linear characterization of the feasible interim allocation rules of a Bayesian single-item environment, and it has several applications in economic and algorithmic mechanism design. All known…
Harsanyi (1955) showed that the only way to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference which satisfies certain desirable properties is ``utilitarianism'', whereby the social utility function is a weighted average of…