Communities of Dialogue Russian and Ukrainian Émigrés in Modernist Prague

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Utility and framing

Paul Weirich

pp. 83-103

Abstract

Standard principles of rational decision assume that an option’s utility is both comprehensive and accessible. These features constrain interpretations of an option’s utility. This essay presents a way of understanding utility and laws of utility. It explains the relation between an option’s utility and its outcome’s utility and argues that an option’s utility is relative to a specification of the option. Utility’s relativity explains how a decision problem’s framing affects an option’s utility and its rationality even for an agent who is cognitively perfect and lacks only empirical information. The essay rewrites standard laws of utility to accommodate relativization to propositions’ specifications. The new laws are generalizations of the standard laws and yield them as special cases.

Publication details

Published in:

Weirich Paul (2010) Realistic standards for decisions. Synthese 176 (1).

Pages: 83-103

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-009-9485-0

Full citation:

Weirich Paul (2010) „Utility and framing“. Synthese 176 (1), 83–103.