Sciweavers

KR
2010
Springer

I Don't Want to Think About it Now: Decision Theory with Costly Computation

14 years 3 months ago
I Don't Want to Think About it Now: Decision Theory with Costly Computation
Computation plays a major role in decision making. Even if an agent is willing to ascribe a probability to all states and a utility to all outcomes, and maximize expected utility, doing so might present serious computational problems. Moreover, computing the outcome of a given act might be difficult. In a companion paper we develop a framework for game theory with costly computation, where the objects of choice are Turing machines. Here we apply that framework to decision theory. We show how well-known phenomena like first-impression-matters biases (i.e., people tend to put more weight on evidence they hear early on), belief polarization (two people with different prior beliefs, hearing the same evidence, can end up with diametrically opposed conclusions), and the status quo bias (people are much more likely to stick with what they already have) can be easily captured in that framework. Finally, we use the framework to define some new notions: value of computational information (a ...
Joseph Y. Halpern
Added 19 Jul 2010
Updated 19 Jul 2010
Type Conference
Year 2010
Where KR
Authors Joseph Y. Halpern
Comments (0)