The objective of this paper is to construct an implementable theory of rational decision-making for cognitive agents subject to realistic resource constraints. It is argued that decision-making should select actions indirectly by selecting plans that prescribe them. It is also argued that although expected values provide the tool for evaluating plans, plans cannot be compared straightforwardly ...

Isaac Levi has long criticized causal decision theory on the grounds that it requires deliberating agents to make predictions about their own actions. A rational agent cannot, he claims, see herself as free to choose an act while simultaneously making a prediction about her likelihood of performing it. Levi is wrong on both points. First, nothing in causal decision theory forces agents to make ...

In a canonical decision problem with standard assumptions, we demonstrate that payoffs and probabilities may interact in such a way that expected-payoffmaximizing decisions do not depend on payoff-relevant information. This result holds without decision costs, cognitive constraints, or other forms of bounded rationality. Instances in which information-frugal decision rules achieve high levels o...

This paper investigates decision-theoretic planning in sophisticated autonomous agents operating in environments of real-world complexity. An example might be a planetary rover exploring a largely unknown planet. It is argued th a t existing algorithms for decision-theoretic planning are based on a logically incorrect theory of rational decision making. Plans cannot be evaluated directly in ter...

This brief position paper1 sketches a view, in many respects conventional, of the role of rationality in artificial intelligence. In this view, rationality is primarily a way to describe coherence between actions and agent attitudes such as belief and preference. Decisions are the fundamental unit of calculation for a rational computer, and therefore we properly refer to them as decision machin...

This paper criticizes the divide ‘by assumption’ between rational choice and behavioral choice and proposes a way of reconnecting ‘bounded’ and ‘unbounded’ rationality. The connection is an epistemic model of rational discovery and problem modeling which can complement both the descriptive behavioral models of search and choice and the prescriptive model of rational choice. The concept of epist...

Political Economy or Economics is a study of mankind in the ordinary business of life; it examines that part of individual and social action which is most closely connected with the attainment and with the use of the material requisites of wellbeing. Thus it is on the one side a study of wealth; and on the other, and more important side, a part of the study of man. For man’s character has been ...

The dominant model of decision making, rational decision making, is increasingly challenged by research on intuitive decision making and emotion. This article contributes to the debate by articulating a model of how rational decision making, intuitive decision making, and emotion influence each other: the critical decision vortex. The critical decision vortex emerges from a discussion between a...

One perspective of a design process in the engineering design community is that it is largely a process marked and defined by a series of decisions. The fundamental assumption in most developed design decision support methodologies is that decision makers make rational choices; that is, choices that maximize the payoff for the predicted outcome. Decisions that do not maximize the predicted payo...

We study the process of multiagent learning in the context of the \Santa Fe Bar Problem" (Arthur 1994). We imagine a system of bounded rational agents taking decisions within a repeated game. Each agent has a nite number of decision procedures with which to reason, and access to the entire history of outcomes of the game. We rst allow the agents to use only deterministic decision procedures. We...