The present paper addresses the issue of optimization of reliability acceptance criteria for components of complex engineered systems with given criterion to acceptable system risk. To this end, the paper first describes how complex engineered systems may be modelled hierarchically by use of Bayesian probabilistic networks. The Bayesian probabilistic network serves as a function relating the re...

Non-expected utility theories, such as rank dependent utility (RDU) theory, have been proposed as alternative models to EU theory in decision making under risk. These models do not share the separability property of expected utility theory. This implies that, in a decision tree, if the reduction of compound lotteries assumption is made (so that preferences at each decision node reduce to RDU pr...

In this paper we discuss the complexity of a dynamic spectrum management problem within a multi-user communication system with K users and N available tones. In this problem a common utility function is optimized. In particular, so called min-rate, harmonic mean and geometric mean utility functions are considered. The complexity of the optimization problems with these utility functions is alrea...

Group utility functions are an extension of the common team utility function for providing multiple agents with a common reinforcement learning signal for learning cooperative behaviour. In this paper we describe what group utility functions are and suggest using them to provide non-player computer game character behaviours. As yet, reinforcement learning techniques have very rarely been used f...

BACKGROUND Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) was adopted as a new standard criterion for diagnosing diabetes. We investigated the diagnostic utility of HbA1c by comparing the 2003 American Diabetes Association (ADA) diagnostic criteria of diabetes with HbA1c of 6.5%. Furthermore, the cut-off value for HbA1c was investigated using receiver operating characteristic curves. METHODS This study included 224 ...

We focus on a class of Multiple Prior Models. Those characterized by nonatomic countably additive priors. Preferences generating such representations have been recently axiomatized in [17]. We argue that this is the proper setting for comparing the notions of unambiguous event given by Epstein and Zhang in [7] and by Ghirardato, Maccheroni and Marinacci in [10]. The two definitions are known to...

In the context of a general multi-variate financial market with transaction costs, we consider the problem of maximizing expected utility from terminal wealth. In contrast with the existing literature, where only the liquidation value of the terminal portfolio is relevant, we consider general utility functions which are only required to be consistent with the structure of the transaction costs....

Fleurbaey and Maniquet have proposed the criteria of conditional equality and of egalitarian equivalence to assess the equity among individuals in an ordinal setting. Empirical applications are rare and only partially consistent with their framework. We propose a new empirical approach that relies on individual preferences, is consistent with the ordinal criteria and enables to compare them wit...