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Whether we like it or not we all feel that the world is uncertain. From choosing a new technology to selecting a job, we rarely know in advance what outcome will result from our decisions. Unfortunately, the standard theory of choice under uncertainty developed in the early forties and fifties turns out to be too rigid to take many tricky issues of choice under uncertainty into account. The good news is that we have now moved away from the early descriptively inadequate modeling of behavior. This book brings the reader into contact with the accomplished progress in individual decision making through the most recent contributions to uncertainty modeling and behavioral decision making. It also introduces the reader into the many subtle issues to be resolved for rational choice under uncertainty.
As desired, the infonnation demand correspondence is single valued at equilibrium prices. Hence no planner is needed to assign infonnation allocations to individuals. Proposition 4. For any given infonnation price system p E . P (F *), almost every a E A demands a unique combined infonnation structure (although traders may be indifferent among partial infonnation sales from different information allocations, etc. ). In particular, the aggregate excess demand correspondence for net combined infonnation trades is a continuous function. Proof Uniqueness fails only if an agent can obtain the same expected utility from two or more net combined infonnation allocations. If this happens, appropriate slight perturbations of personal probability vectors destroy the equality unless the utility functions and wealth allocations were independent across states. Yet, when utilities and wealths don't depend on states in S, no infonnation to distinguish the states is desired, so that the demand for such infonnation structures must equal zero. To show the second claim, recall that if the correspondence is single valued for almost every agent, then its integral is also single valued. Finally, note that an upper hemicontinuous (by Proposition 2) correspondence which is single valued everywhere is, in fact, a continuous function. [] REFERENCES Allen, Beth (1986a). "The Demand for (Differentiated) Infonnation"; Review of Economic Studies. 53. (311-323). Allen, Beth (1986b). "General Equilibrium with Infonnation Sales"; Theory and Decision. 21. (1-33). Allen, Beth (1990). "Infonnation as an Economic Commodity"; American Economic Review. 80. (268-273).
A comprehensive framework for assessing strategies for managing risk and uncertainty, integrating theory and practice and synthesizing insights from many fields. This book offers a framework for making decisions under risk and uncertainty. Synthesizing research from economics, finance, decision theory, management, and other fields, the book provides a set of tools and a way of thinking that determines the relative merits of different strategies. It takes as its premise that we make better decisions if we use the whole toolkit of economics and related fields to inform our decision making. The text explores the distinction between risk and uncertainty and covers standard models of decision making under risk as well as more recent work on decision making under uncertainty, with a particular focus on strategic interaction. It also examines the implications of incomplete markets for managing under uncertainty. It presents four core strategies: a benchmark strategy (proceeding as if risk and uncertainty were low), a financial hedging strategy (valuable if there is much risk), an operational hedging strategy (valuable for conditions of much uncertainty), and a flexible strategy (valuable if there is much risk and/or uncertainty). The book then examines various aspects of these strategies in greater depth, building on empirical work in several different fields. Topics include price-setting, real options and Monte Carlo techniques, organizational structure, and behavioral biases. Many chapters include exercises and appendixes with additional material. The book can be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in risk management, as a guide for researchers, or as a reference for management practitioners.
At its core, economics is about making decisions. In the history of economic thought, great intellectual prowess has been exerted toward devising exquisite theories of optimal decision making in situations of constraint, risk, and scarcity. Yet not all of our choices are purely logical, and so there is a longstanding tension between those emphasizing the rational and irrational sides of human behavior. One strand develops formal models of rational utility maximizing while the other draws on what behavioral science has shown about our tendency to act irrationally. In Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty, George G. Szpiro offers a new narrative of the three-century history of the study of decision making, tracing how crucial ideas have evolved and telling the stories of the thinkers who shaped the field. Szpiro examines economics from the early days of theories spun from anecdotal evidence to the rise of a discipline built around elegant mathematics through the past half century’s interest in describing how people actually behave. Considering the work of Locke, Bentham, Jevons, Walras, Friedman, Tversky and Kahneman, Thaler, and a range of other thinkers, he sheds light on the vast scope of discovery since Bernoulli first proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox. Presenting fundamental mathematical theories in easy-to-understand language, Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty is a revelatory history for readers seeking to grasp the grand sweep of economic thought.
An introduction to decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective, covering both theory and applications ranging from speech recognition to airborne collision avoidance. Many important problems involve decision making under uncertainty—that is, choosing actions based on often imperfect observations, with unknown outcomes. Designers of automated decision support systems must take into account the various sources of uncertainty while balancing the multiple objectives of the system. This book provides an introduction to the challenges of decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective. It presents both the theory behind decision making models and algorithms and a collection of example applications that range from speech recognition to aircraft collision avoidance. Focusing on two methods for designing decision agents, planning and reinforcement learning, the book covers probabilistic models, introducing Bayesian networks as a graphical model that captures probabilistic relationships between variables; utility theory as a framework for understanding optimal decision making under uncertainty; Markov decision processes as a method for modeling sequential problems; model uncertainty; state uncertainty; and cooperative decision making involving multiple interacting agents. A series of applications shows how the theoretical concepts can be applied to systems for attribute-based person search, speech applications, collision avoidance, and unmanned aircraft persistent surveillance. Decision Making Under Uncertainty unifies research from different communities using consistent notation, and is accessible to students and researchers across engineering disciplines who have some prior exposure to probability theory and calculus. It can be used as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in fields including computer science, aerospace and electrical engineering, and management science. It will also be a valuable professional reference for researchers in a variety of disciplines.
In every decision context there are things we know and things we do not know. Risk analysis uses science and the best available evidence to assess what we know-and it is intentional in the way it addresses the importance of the things we don't know. Principles of Risk Analysis: Decision Making Under Uncertainty lays out the tasks of risk analysis i
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is one of several federal agencies responsible for protecting Americans against significant risks to human health and the environment. As part of that mission, EPA estimates the nature, magnitude, and likelihood of risks to human health and the environment; identifies the potential regulatory actions that will mitigate those risks and protect public health1 and the environment; and uses that information to decide on appropriate regulatory action. Uncertainties, both qualitative and quantitative, in the data and analyses on which these decisions are based enter into the process at each step. As a result, the informed identification and use of the uncertainties inherent in the process is an essential feature of environmental decision making. EPA requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) convene a committee to provide guidance to its decision makers and their partners in states and localities on approaches to managing risk in different contexts when uncertainty is present. It also sought guidance on how information on uncertainty should be presented to help risk managers make sound decisions and to increase transparency in its communications with the public about those decisions. Given that its charge is not limited to human health risk assessment and includes broad questions about managing risks and decision making, in this report the committee examines the analysis of uncertainty in those other areas in addition to human health risks. Environmental Decisions in the Face of Uncertainty explains the statement of task and summarizes the findings of the committee.
This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broadens traditional approaches and tools to include the analysis of actors and networks related to the problem at hand. It also shows how lessons learned in the application process can be used to improve the approaches and tools used in the design process. The book offers guidance in identifying and applying appropriate approaches and tools to design plans, as well as advice on implementing these plans in the real world. For decisionmakers and practitioners, the book includes realistic examples and practical guidelines that should help them understand what decisionmaking under deep uncertainty is and how it may be of assistance to them. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice is divided into four parts. Part I presents five approaches for designing strategic plans under deep uncertainty: Robust Decision Making, Dynamic Adaptive Planning, Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, Info-Gap Decision Theory, and Engineering Options Analysis. Each approach is worked out in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodological steps to follow when using the approach, latest methodological insights, and challenges for improvement. In Part II, applications of each of these approaches are presented. Based on recent case studies, the practical implications of applying each approach are discussed in depth. Part III focuses on using the approaches and tools in real-world contexts, based on insights from real-world cases. Part IV contains conclusions and a synthesis of the lessons that can be drawn for designing, applying, and implementing strategic plans under deep uncertainty, as well as recommendations for future work. The publication of this book has been funded by the Radboud University, the RAND Corporation, Delft University of Technology, and Deltares.
Much economic advice is bogus quantification, warn two leading experts in this essential book, now with a preface on COVID-19. Invented numbers offer a false sense of security; we need instead robust narratives that give us the confidence to manage uncertainty. “An elegant and careful guide to thinking about personal and social economics, especially in a time of uncertainty. The timing is impeccable." — Christine Kenneally, New York Times Book Review Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless. The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.
This book describes the classical axiomatic theories of decision under uncertainty, as well as critiques thereof and alternative theories. It focuses on the meaning of probability, discussing some definitions and surveying their scope of applicability. The behavioral definition of subjective probability serves as a way to present the classical theories, culminating in Savage's theorem. The limitations of this result as a definition of probability lead to two directions - first, similar behavioral definitions of more general theories, such as non-additive probabilities and multiple priors, and second, cognitive derivations based on case-based techniques.