Naiveté and sophistication in dynamic inconsistency

This paper introduces a general framework for dealing with dynamic inconsistency in the context of Markov decision problems. It carefully decouples and examines concepts that are often entwined in the literature: it distinguishes between the decision maker and its various temporal agents, and between the beliefs and intentions of the agents. Classical examples on naive and sophisticated decision makers are formalized and contrasted based on this new language. Providing a unified formalism to deal with these constructs allows for the introduction of a mixed type of decision-maker, who is naive in some states and sophisticated in others. Such a mixed type can be used to model situations which were inaccessible with previous approaches.