Decision theory with resource-bounded agents

Joseph Y. Halpern*, Rafael Pass, Lior Seeman

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

14 Scopus citations

Abstract

There have been two major lines of research aimed at capturing resource-bounded players in game theory. The first, initiated by Rubinstein (), charges an agent for doing costly computation; the second, initiated by Neyman (), does not charge for computation, but limits the computation that agents can do, typically by modeling agents as finite automata. We review recent work on applying both approaches in the context of decision theory. For the first approach, we take the objects of choice in a decision problem to be Turing machines, and charge players for the "complexity" of the Turing machine chosen (e.g., its running time). This approach can be used to explain well-known phenomena like first-impression-matters biases (i.e., people tend to put more weight on evidence they hear early on) and belief polarization (two people with different prior beliefs, hearing the same evidence, can end up with diametrically opposed conclusions) as the outcomes of quite rational decisions. For the second approach, we model people as finite automata, and provide a simple algorithm that, on a problem that captures a number of settings of interest, provably performs optimally as the number of states in the automaton increases.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)245-257
Number of pages13
JournalTopics in Cognitive Science
Volume6
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2014
Externally publishedYes

Funding

FundersFunder number
Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering0911036, 1214844, 0746990, 0812045

    Keywords

    • Bounded rationality
    • Cost of computation
    • Decision theory

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