Adaptive utility and trial aversion

Abstract

Decision making with adaptive utility provides a generalisation to classical Bayesian decision theory, allowing the creation of a normative theory for decision selection when preferences are initially uncertain. In this paper we address some of the foundational issues of adaptive utility as seen from the perspective of a Bayesian statistician. The implications that such a generalisation has upon the traditional utility concepts of value of information and risk aversion are also explored, with a new concept of trial aversion introduced that is similar to risk aversion, but which concerns a decision maker's aversion to selecting decisions with high uncertainty over resulting utility.