Related papers: Utility of Choice: An Information Theoretic Approa…
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…
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…
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.…
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 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 decision maker's utility depends on her action $a\in A \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ and the payoff relevant state of the world $\theta\in \Theta$. One can define the value of acquiring new information as the difference between the maximum…
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…
We present a method for calculating and analyzing stakeholder utilities of processes that arise in, but are not limited to, the social sciences. These areas include business process analysis, healthcare workflow analysis and policy process…
We study a continuous-time expected utility maximization problem in which the investor at maturity receives the value of a contingent claim in addition to the investment payoff from the financial market. The investor knows nothing about the…
The background for the general mathematical link between utility and information theory investigated in this paper is a simple financial market model with two kinds of small traders: less informed traders and insiders, whose extra…
In this paper we extend Savage's theory of decision-making under uncertainty from a classical environment into a non-classical one. We formulate the corresponding axioms and provide representation theorems for qualitative measures and…
We consider an agent who has access to a financial market, including derivative contracts, who looks to maximise her utility. Whilst the agent looks to maximise utility over one probability measure, or class of probability measures, she…
For an exponential utility maximizing investment strategy in a Black-Scholes Setting, fixed upper and lower constraints are introduced on the terminal wealth. This is equivalent to combining the optimal strategy with options. The resulting…
Modern portfolio theory(MPT) addresses the problem of determining the optimum allocation of investment resources among a set of candidate assets. In the original mean-variance approach of Markowitz, volatility is taken as a proxy for risk,…
In a consideration set model, an individual maximizes utility among the considered alternatives. I relate a consideration set additive random utility model to classic discrete choice and the extended additive random utility model, in which…
This survey reviews recent developments in revealed preference theory. It discusses the testable implications of theories of choice that are germane to specific economic environments. The focus is on expected utility in risky environments;…
This paper builds a rule for decisionmaking from the physical behavior of single neurons, the well established neural circuitry of mutual inhibition, and the evolutionary principle of natural selection. No axioms are used in the derivation…
Diversification represents the idea of choosing variety over uniformity. Within the theory of choice, desirability of diversification is axiomatized as preference for a convex combination of choices that are equivalently ranked. This…
Traditional learning approaches for classification implicitly assume that each mistake has the same cost. In many real-world problems though, the utility of a decision depends on the underlying context $x$ and decision $y$. However,…
Mutually exclusive decisions have been studied for decades. Many well-known decision theories have been defined to help people either to make rational decisions or to interpret people's behaviors, such as expected utility theory, regret…