Higher-order decision theory

DOI10.1007/978-3-319-67504-6_17zbMATH Open1398.91182arXiv1506.01003OpenAlexW1804083637MaRDI QIDQ1990306FDOQ1990306

Philipp Zahn, Paulo Oliva, Evguenia Shprits, Jules Hedges, Viktor Winschel

Publication date: 25 October 2018

Abstract: Classical decision theory models behaviour in terms of utility maximisation where utilities represent rational preference relations over outcomes. However, empirical evidence and theoretical considerations suggest that we need to go beyond this framework. We propose to represent goals by higher-order functions or operators that take other functions as arguments where the max and argmax operators are special cases. Our higher-order functions take a context function as their argument where a context represents a process from actions to outcomes. By that we can define goals being dependent on the actions and the process in addition to outcomes only. This formulation generalises outcome based preferences to context-dependent goals. We show how to uniformly represent within our higher-order framework classical utility maximisation but also various other extensions that have been debated in economics.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.01003

Recommendations

• Redoing the foundations of decision theory
• Constructive decision theory
• Choice structures in games
• Constructive decision theory
• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2131727

zbMATH Keywords

decision theorypreferencesquantifiersutility functionshigher-order functions

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Decision theory (91B06)

Cited In (4)

• Diegetic Representation of Feedback in Open Games
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Hierarchical decision procedure
• Title not available (Why is that?)

This page was built for publication: Higher-order decision theory

Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q1990306)