演讲题目：Constructive decision theory

演讲时间：2011年10月28日（星期五）上午10:00-12:10

演讲地点：588888纽约国际官方网站理科二号楼2736

演讲嘉宾：Joe Halpern

嘉宾简介：康奈尔大学计算机科学系主任、教授

美国人工智能协会 (AAAI)、美国计算机学会 (ACM) 及美国科学发展协会(AAAS) 院士

Dr.Joseph Halpern received a B.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1975 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard in 1981. In between, he spent two years as the head of the Mathematics Department at Bawku Secondary School, in Ghana. After a year as a visiting scientist at MIT, he joined the IBM Almaden Research Center in 1982, where he remained until 1996, also serving as a consulting professor at Stanford. In 1996, he joined the CS Department at Cornell, and is now department chair.

摘要：Decision theory with subjective states and outcomes The standard approach in decision theory (going back to Savage) is to place a preference order on acts, where an act is a function from states to outcomes. If the preference order satisfies appropriate postulates, then the decision maker can be viewed as acting as if he has a probability on states and a utility function on outcomes, and is maximizing expected utility. This framework implicitly assumes that the decision maker knows what the states and outcomes are. That isn't reasonable in a complex situation. For example, in trying to decide whether or not to attack Iraq, what are the states and what are the outcomes? We redo Savage viewing acts essentially as syntactic programs. We don't need to assume either states or outcomes. However, among other things, we can get representation theorems in the spirit of Savage's theorems; for Savage, the agent's probability and utility are subjective; for us, in addition to the probability and utility being subjective, so is the state space and the outcome space. I discuss the benefits, both conceptual and pragmatic, of this approach. As I show, among other things, it provides an elegant solution to framing problems.

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