Related papers: Hippocratic Utility
This paper introduces conceptual relations that synthesize utilitarian and logical concepts, extending the logics of preference of Rescher. We define first, in the context of a possible worlds model, constraint-dependent measures that…
Most ethical work is done at a low level of formality. This makes practical moral questions inaccessible to formal and natural sciences and can lead to misunderstandings in ethical discussion. In this paper, we use Bayesian inference to…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
Decision theory has become widely accepted in the AI community as a useful framework for planning and decision making. Applying the framework typically requires elicitation of some form of probability and utility information. While much…
Classical Decision Theory provides a normative framework for representing and reasoning about complex preferences. Straightforward application of this theory to automate decision making is difficult due to high elicitation cost. In response…
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…
Typically, merit is defined with respect to some intrinsic measure of worth. We instead consider a setting where an individual's worth is \emph{relative}: when a Decision Maker (DM) selects a set of individuals from a population to maximise…
Dynamic treatment regimes have been proposed to personalize treatment decisions by utilizing historical patient data, but they may not always improve on the current standard of care. It is thus meaningful to integrate the standard of care…
If uncertainty is modelled by a probability measure, decisions are typically made by choosing the option with the highest expected utility. If an imprecise probability model is used instead, this decision rule can be generalised in several…
Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
We investigate the application of classification techniques to utility elicitation. In a decision problem, two sets of parameters must generally be elicited: the probabilities and the utilities. While the prior and conditional probabilities…
We establish when the two problems of minimizing a function of lifetime minimum wealth and of maximizing utility of lifetime consumption result in the same optimal investment strategy on a given open interval $O$ in wealth space. To answer…
We study how individuals trade off outcome ("what") and process ("how") utility in high-stakes strategic decisions, namely professional tennis. Using optimality conditions and the second-service rule, we derive a sufficient condition for…
This article focuses on the work of O. Chanel and G. Chichilnisky (2013) on the flaws of expected utility theory while assessing the value of life. Expected utility is a fundamental tool in decision theory. However, it does not fit with the…
In usual demographic analysis, force of mortality is a function of one variable, that is, of age. In this article bi-variate and multivariate force of mortality functions are introduced for the first time to explain mortality differentials.…
Patients who are seriously ill may ask doctors to treat them with unapproved medication, about which not much is known, or else with known medication in a high dosage. Apart from strict legal constraints such cases may involve difficult…
An important objective in the development of targeted therapies is to identify the populations where the treatment under consideration has positive benefit risk balance. We consider pivotal clinical trials, where the efficacy of a treatment…
Many interventions in global health save lives. One criticism sometimes lobbed at these interventions invokes the spirit of Malthus. The good done, the charge goes, is offset by the harm of spreading the earth's limited resources more…
It is common to compare individualized treatment rules based on the value function, which is the expected potential outcome under the treatment rule. Although the value function is not point-identified when there is unmeasured confounding,…