Related papers: Hippocratic Utility
In this paper I explore the human organ procurement system. Which is better for saving lives and limiting black market use, the present altruistic system of donations or a free and open sales market? I explain that there is a risk with…
Participatory budgeting refers to the practice of allocating public resources by collecting and aggregating individual preferences. Most existing studies in this field often assume an additive utility function, where each individual holds a…
This paper presents duality between probability distributions and utility functions.
We pursue an inverse approach to utility theory and consumption & investment problems. Instead of specifying an agent's utility function and deriving her actions, we assume we observe her actions (i.e. her consumption and investment…
Modeling the preferences of agents over a set of alternatives is a principal concern in many areas. The dominant approach has been to find a single reward/utility function with the property that alternatives yielding higher rewards are…
A utility-function approach to optimal spatial sampling design is a powerful way to quantify what "optimality" means. The emphasis then should be to capture all possible contributions to utility, including scientific impact and the cost of…
In machine learning or scientific computing, model performance is measured with an objective function. But why choose one objective over another? Information theory gives one answer: To maximize the information in the model, select the…
When some resources are to be distributed among a set of agents following egalitarian social welfare, the goal is to maximize the utility of the agent whose utility turns out to be minimal. In this context, agents can have an incentive to…
Altruistic lobbying is lobbying in the public interest or in the interest of the least protected part of the society. In fact, an altruist has a wide range of strategies, from behaving in the interest of the society as a whole to the…
Based on the observation that many existing discrete choice models admit a welfare function of utilities whose gradient gives the choice probability vector, we propose a new representation of discrete choice model which we call the…
A randomized clinical trial comparing an experimental new treatment to a standard therapy for a life-threatening medical condition should be stopped early on ethical grounds, in either of the following scenarios: (1) it has become…
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…
To successfully navigate its environment, an agent must construct and maintain representations of the other agents that it encounters. Such representations are useful for many tasks, but they are not without cost. As a result, agents must…
Although many investigators affirm a desire to build reasoning systems that behave consistently with the axiomatic basis defined by probability theory and utility theory, limited resources for engineering and computation can make a complete…
Who {\em values} life annuities more? Is it the healthy retiree who expects to live long and might become a centenarian, or is the unhealthy retiree with a short life expectancy more likely to appreciate the pooling of longevity risk? What…
An analyst observes an agent take a sequence of actions. The analyst does not have access to the agent's information and ponders whether the observed actions could be justified through a rational Bayesian model with a known utility…
The locations problem in infinite ethics concerns the relative moral status of different categories of potential bearers of value, the primary examples of which are people and points in time. The challenge is to determine which category of…
A key issue in the estimation of energy hedges is the hedgers' attitude towards risk which is encapsulated in the form of the hedgers' utility function. However, the literature typically uses only one form of utility function such as the…
We argue for a foundational epistemic claim and a hypothesis about the production and uses of mathematical epidemiological models, exploring the consequences for our political and socio-economic lives. First, in order to make the best use…
Selection effects in cosmology are often invoked to "explain" why some of the fundamental constant of Nature, and in particular the cosmological constant, take on the value they do in our Universe. We briefly review this probabilistic…