Related papers: Great Expectations. Part II: Generalized Expected …
Egalitarian considerations play a central role in many areas of social choice theory. Applications of egalitarian principles range from ensuring everyone gets an equal share of a cake when deciding how to divide it, to guaranteeing balance…
A dynamic model of collective consumption and saving decisions made by a finite number of agents with constant but different discount rates is developed. Collective utility is a weighted sum of individual utilities with time-varying utility…
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,…
One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…
A decision is an act or event of decision taking. Decision making always includes decision taking, the latter not involving significant exchanges with non-deciding agents. A decision outcome is a piece of storable information constituting…
Shafer's theory of belief and the Bayesian theory of probability are two alternative and mutually inconsistent approaches toward modelling uncertainty in artificial intelligence. To help reduce the conflict between these two approaches,…
The free energy functional has recently been proposed as a variational principle for bounded rational decision-making, since it instantiates a natural trade-off between utility gains and information processing costs that can be…
We provide sufficient conditions under which a utility function may be recovered from a finite choice experiment. Identification, as is commonly understood in decision theory, is not enough. We provide a general recoverability result that…
A group of experts, for instance climate scientists, is to choose among two policies $f$ and $g$. Consider the following decision rule. If all experts agree that the expected utility of $f$ is higher than the expected utility of $g$, the…
Selection, the tendency of some traits to become more frequent than others in a population under the influence of some (natural or artificial) agency, is a key component of Darwinian evolution and countless other natural and social…
In this paper we have devised an alternative methodological approach for quantifying utility in terms of expected information content of the decision-maker's choice set. We have proposed an extension to the concept of utility by…
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…
General Equilibrium Theory is the benchmark of economics, especially its results concerning the efficient allocation of resources, known as the First and Second Welfare Theorems. Yet, General Equilibrium Theory is beyond the scope of most…
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.…
Shepard's Universal Law of Generalization offered a compelling case for the first physics-like law in cognitive science that should hold for all intelligent agents in the universe. Shepard's account is based on a rational Bayesian model of…
Agents care not only about the outcomes of collective decisions but also about how decisions are made. In many cases, both the outcome and the procedure affect whether agents see a decision as legitimate, justifiable, or acceptable. We…
Recent literature in the last Maximum Entropy workshop introduced an analogy between cumulative probability distributions and normalized utility functions. Based on this analogy, a utility density function can de defined as the derivative…
In the problem of fully allocating an infinitely divisible commodity among agents whose preferences are single-peaked, we show that the uniform rule is the only allocation rule that satisfies efficiency, the equal division guarantee,…
In the large financial market, which is described by a model with countably many traded assets, we formulate the problem of the expected utility maximization. Assuming that the preferences of an economic agent are modeled with a stochastic…
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…