In Newcomb’s paradox you choose to receive either the contents of a particular closed box, or the contents of both that closed box and another one. Before you choose, a prediction algorithm deduces your choice, and fills the two boxes based on that deduction. Newcomb’s paradox is that game theory appears to provide two conflicting recommendations for what choice you should make in this scenario...

Causal knowledge serves two functions: it allows us to predict future events on the basis of observations and to plan actions. Although associative learning theories traditionally differentiate between learning based on observations (classical conditioning) and learning based on the outcomes of actions (instrumental conditioning), they fail to express the common basis of these two modes of acce...

In this paper, decision theory was used to derive Bayes and minimax decision rules to estimate allelic frequencies and to explore their admissibility. Decision rules with uniformly smallest risk usually do not exist and one approach to solve this problem is to use the Bayes principle and the minimax principle to find decision rules satisfying some general optimality criterion based on their ris...