Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UC Berkeley

UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations bannerUC Berkeley

Rationality and Expected Utility

Abstract

We commonly make a distinction between what we simply tend to do and what

we would have done had we undergone an ideal reasoning process - or, in other words,

what we would have done if we were perfectly rational. Formal decision theories, like

Expected Utility Theory or Risk-Weighted Expected Utility Theory, have been used

to model the considerations that govern rational behavior.

But questions arise when we try to articulate what this kind of modeling amounts

to. Firstly, it is not clear how the components of the formal model correspond to

real-world psychological or physical facts that ground judgments about what we

ought to do. Secondly, there is a great deal of debate surrounding what an accurate

model of rationality would look like. Theorists disagree about how much

flexibility a rational agent has in weighing the risk of a loss against the value of potential gains, for example.

The goal of this project is to provide an interpretation of Expected Utility Theory

whereby it explicates or represents the pressure that fundamentally governs how

human agents ought to behave. That means both articulating how the components

of the formal model correspond to real-world facts, and defending Expected Utility

Theory against alternative formal models of rationality.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View