Evaluating options in a context

  • Authors:
  • John F. Horty;Martha E. Pollack

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Maryland, College Park, MD;University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • TARK '98 Proceedings of the 7th conference on Theoretical aspects of rationality and knowledge
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

The theory of rational choice, as formulated in the economic and philosophical literature, assumes that agents evaluate alternative actions by reference to a probability distribution over their possible outcomes together with a utility function defined on those outcomes: in the simplest case, the agent combines probability and utility into a notion of expected utility defined over actions, and then chooses some action whose expected utility is maximal. A good deal of attention has been devoted to the structure of those utility functions that might actually be thought to underlie human decision making [9], and the more applied literature on decision analysis has focused on the task of eliciting such preference information from humans [8]. When we attempt to build artificial agents that are capable of making rational decisions, we likewise need to provide them with techniques for evaluating the options they encounter.