Efficient Elicitation of Utility and Probability Weighting Functions

Error Propagation in the Elicitation of Utility and Probability Weighting Functions

Elicitation methods in decision-making under risk allow us to infer the utilities of outcomes as well as the probability weights from the observed preferences of an individual. An optimally efficient elicitation method is proposed, which takes the inevitable distortion of preferences by random errors into account and minimizes the effect of such errors on the inferred utility and probability we...

Efficient robust elicitation of individual utility and decision weight functions

Abstract: In choice under risk an individual decision making is typically described by an individual's utility function over monetary outcomes and an individual’s decision weight function over probabilities. A three-stage procedure is proposed for efficient robust nonparametric elicitation of these functions. First, a tradeoff method is used to elicit several probabilities with a known individu...

Weighted Quasi-Arithmetic Means: Utility Functions and Weighting Functions

Incremental Constraint-Based Elicitation of Multi-Attribute Utility Functions

In problem solving, the decision-theoretic framework is invoked when we wish to define a rich notion of preference over possible solutions. While decision theory provides a clean framwork for representing preference information, eliciting that information can often be difficult. When solutions are simply concrete outcomes, preferences can be represented directly by simply ranking the outcomes. ...

Nonlinear neurobiological probability weighting functions for aversive outcomes

While mainstream economic models assume that individuals treat probabilities objectively, many people tend to overestimate the likelihood of improbable events and underestimate the likelihood of probable events. However, a biological account for why probabilities would be treated this way does not yet exist. While undergoing fMRI, we presented individuals with a series of lotteries, defined by ...