Related papers: Hippocratic Utility
Data-driven decision making plays an important role even in high stakes settings like medicine and public policy. Learning optimal policies from observed data requires a careful formulation of the utility function whose expected value is…
Empirical studies show that preference for prevention versus treatment remains a subject of debate. We build a paradigm model combining a utility game for the individual-level dilemma of prevention versus treatment, and a compartmental…
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…
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…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
Utility functions or their equivalents (value functions, objective functions, loss functions, reward functions, preference orderings) are a central tool in most current machine learning systems. These mechanisms for defining goals and…
Balancing fairness and efficiency in resource allocation is a classical economic and computational problem. The price of fairness measures the worst-case loss of economic efficiency when using an inefficient but fair allocation rule; for…
It has been proposed in medical decision analysis to express the ``first do no harm'' principle as an asymmetric utility function in which the loss from killing a patient would count more than the gain from saving a life. Such a utility…
Suppose some future technology enables the same consciously experienced human life to be repeated, identically or nearly so, N times, in series or in parallel. Is this roughly N times as valuable as enabling the same life once, because each…
Being a complex subject of major importance in AI Safety research, value alignment has been studied from various perspectives in the last years. However, no final consensus on the design of ethical utility functions facilitating AI value…
Motivated by cost of computation in game theory, we explore how changing the utilities of players (changing their complexity costs) affects the outcome of a game. We show that even if we improve a player's utility in every action profile,…
In the theory of social choice the research is focused around the projection of individual preference orders to the social preference order. Also, the justification of the preference order formalism begins with the concept of utility i.e.…
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…
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…
Understanding the cognitive underpinnings of moral judgment is one of most pressing problems in psychological science. Some highly-cited studies suggest that reliance on intuition decreases utilitarian (expected welfare maximizing)…
[Context and motivation:] For realistic self-adaptive systems, multiple quality attributes need to be considered and traded off against each other. These quality attributes are commonly encoded in a utility function, for instance, a…
Heterogeneous treatment effects are of major interest in economics. For example, a poverty reduction measure would be best evaluated by its effects on those who would be poor in the absence of the treatment, or by the share among the poor…
This paper considers quantile-welfare evaluation of social welfare as an alternative to utilitarian evaluation. Manski (1988) originally proposed and studied maximization of quantile utility as a model of individual decision making under…
Inferring a decision maker's utility function typically involves an elicitation phase where the decision maker responds to a series of elicitation queries, followed by an estimation phase where the state-of-the-art is to either fit the…
The consumption function maps current wealth and the exogenous state to current consumption. We prove the existence and uniqueness of a consumption function when the agent has a preference for wealth. When the period utility functions are…