Great Expectations: Cost-Utility Models as Decision Criteria

Great Expectations. Part II: Generalized Expected Utility as a Universal Decision Rule

Many different rules for decision making have been introduced in the literature. We show that a notion of generalized expected utility proposed in a com­ panion paper [Chu and Halpern, 2003] is a univer­ sal decision rule, in the sense that it can represent essentially all other decision rules.

Decision Modeling for Cost-Utility Analysis.

Decision Processes with Total-cost Criteria'

By a decision process is meant a pair (X, r), where X is an arbitrary set (the state space), and r associates to each point x in X an arbitrary nonempty collection of discrete probability measures (actions) on X. In a decision process with nonnegative costs depending on the current state, the action taken, and the following state, there is always available a Markov strategy which uniformly (nea...

Cost-utility analysis: use QALYs only with great caution.

Markov Decision Models with Weighted Discounted Criteria

We consider a discrete time Markov Decision Process with innnite horizon. The criterion to be maximized is the sum of a number of standard discounted rewards, each with a diierent discount factor. Situations in which such criteria arise include modeling investments, production, modeling projects of diierent durations and systems with multiple criteria, and some axiomatic formulations of multi-a...