Imposing security constraints on agent-based decision support

The principle of maximising the expected utility has had a large influence on agent-based decision support. Even though this principle is often useful when evaluating a decision situation, it is not always the most rational decision rule and other candidates are worth considering. A decision making agent may want, for example, to exclude particular strategies which, in some sense, are too risky with respect to certain thresholds. A theory is presented for situations where a decision making agent, human or machine, has to choose between a finite set of strategies having access to a finite set of autonomous agents reporting their opinions on the strategies. The approach considers a decision problem with respect to the contents and the credibilities of the reports, and the main emphasis is on how to perform analyses in decision situations where the available information is vague or numerically imprecise.