Choice under uncertainty
Choice under uncertainty The area of choice under uncertainty represents the heart of decision theory. Known from the 17th century (Blaise pascal invoked it in his famous wager, which is contained in his pensees, published in 1670), the idea of expected values is that, when faced with a number of actions, each of which could give rise to more than one possible outcome with different probabilities, the rational procedure is to identify all possible outcomes, determine their values (positive or negative) and the probabilities that will result from each course of action, and multiply the two to give an "expected value", or the average expectation for an outcome; the action to be chosen should be the one that gives rise to the highest total expected value. In 1738, Daniel bournouli published an influential paper entitled Exposition of a New Theory on the Measurement of Risk , in which he uses the st, petersburg to show that e...