PHIL 325

PHIL 325: Risk, choice and rationality
Instructor: Katalin Bimbo

Course Description:

Everybody makes decisions on an everyday basis. This course is an introduction to formal decision theory. The course will start with considering the simplest kind of situations, and move toward more and more complicated ones. In the process, we will introduce probabilities, utilities and other agents. The use of fully additive probabilities has been questioned in the context of decision theory; hence, we will look at some interpretations of probabilities and some variants of the standard von Neumann--Morgenstern utility theory. Certain situations involving several agents making decisions may be described using game theory; we will look at some simple games such as the game colloquially called prisoners' dilemma. Society comprises many individual agents, which raises questions about the aggregation of preferences. Toward the end of the course, we will take a look at voting methods and some extensions of decision theory to large groups of agents.