ABSTRACT

Decision theory requires agents to assign probabilities to states of the world and utilities to the possible outcomes of different actions. When agents commit to having the probabilities and/or utilities in a decision problem defined by objective features of the world, they may find themselves unable to decide which actions maximize expected utility. Decision theory has long recognized that work-around strategies are available in special cases; this is where dominance reasoning, minimax, and maximin play a role. Here we describe a different work around, wherein a rational decision about one decision problem can be reached by ‘interpolating’ information from another problem that the agent believes has already been rationally solved.

摘要

决策理论要求代理人将概率分配给世界状态，并将效用分配给不同行动的可能结果。当代理人承诺在由世界的客观特征定义的决策问题中具有概率和/或效用时，他们可能会发现自己无法决定哪些行动可以最大化预期效用。决策理论很早就认识到，在特殊情况下可以使用变通策略。这就是支配推理、极小极大和极大极小发挥作用的地方。在这里，我们描述了一种不同的解决方法，其中可以通过从智能体认为已经合理解决的另一个问题中“插入”信息来达成关于一个决策问题的理性决策。