The problem of coalition formation when agents are uncertain about the types or capabilities of their potential partners is a critical one. In [3] a Bayesian reinforcement learning framework is developed for this problem when coalitions are formed (and tasks undertaken) repeatedly: not only does the model allow agents to refine their beliefs about the types of others, but uses value of informat...

My thesis is entitled ”Contributions to Simulation-based High-dimensional Sequential Decision Making”. The context of the thesis is about games, planning and Markov Decision Processes. An agent interacts with its environment by successively making decisions. The agent starts from an initial state until a final state in which the agent can not make decision anymore. At each timestep, the agent r...

The present investigation aims at the construction of a sequential decision procedure derived from a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) model. An optimal clinical management strategy based on a risk assessment of patients is to be found. A decision theoretic cost model different from the general approach has been selected for this clinical management (and classification) task:...

Today’s corporate managers face challenges in information technology (IT) adoption with great stakes. The waiting period for an IT investment to be realized, if any, could be long; thus word-of-mouth information propagation may not help them to make wise decisions. Though information used by early adopters to make their decisions may not be available to the public, late adopters can often obser...

Sequential decision-making problems with multiple objectives arise naturally in practice and pose unique challenges for research in decision-theoretic planning and learning, which has largely focused on single-objective settings. This article surveys algorithms designed for sequential decision-making problems with multiple objectives. Though there is a growing body of literature on this subject...

With indivisible shareholdings and simultaneous shareholder decisionmaking, the existing takeover literature provides a reasonable pro…t only in asymmetric equilibria. We allow the raider to approach shareholders sequentially and thereby …nd a unique equilibrium that produces the same outcome. J.E.L. classi…cation: L10, G34, H41.

While network query engines make it possible to gather andcombine data from multiple Web sources, these systemsprimarily focus on efficient query execution and do notsolve some of the more complicated problems of onlineinformation gathering. Such problems require alternativetypes of control flow and better integration with the externalworld; the unique nature of the ...

Melioration-defined as choosing a lesser, local gain over a greater longer term gain-is a behavioral tendency that people and pigeons share. As such, the empirical occurrence of meliorating behavior has frequently been interpreted as evidence that the mechanisms of human choice violate the norms of economic rationality. In some environments, the relationship between actions and outcomes is know...

In this article we propose a two stage procedure to model demand decisions by customers who are balancing several dimensions of a product. We then test our procedure by analyzing the behavior of buyers from an Austrian price comparison site. Although in such a market a consumer will typically search for the cheapest price for a given product, reliability and service of the supplier are other im...