Decision Making with Multiple Imperfect Decision Makers

at the 24^th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS-10)

December 10, 2010 

Whistler, British Columbia, Canada 

!!! Springer book of the selected workshop contributions !!!

!!!Workshop photos!!!

Prescriptive Bayesian decision making has reached a high level of maturity, supported by efficient, theoretically well-founded algorithms.  While the long-standing problem of describing a single decision maker’s bounded rationality is well-known, the similar problem for systems of multiple decision makers with limited cognitive, acting and evaluative abilities/resources has not been considered systematically.

Societal, biological, and engineered systems all involve such sets of multiple imperfect decision makers, and can provide insight into describing the behaviour of such systems. In addition, engineered systems involve instances of prescribing behaviour of such systems.  

The goal of this workshop is to explore such connections between descriptive and prescriptive decision making of multiple decision makers.  The workshop will focus on the relation between instances of bounded-rationality and imperfection of decision-makers in natural and engineered systems. We expect the workshop to contribute to the solution of the following problems:

• How should we formalise rational decision making of a single imperfect decision maker? Does the answer change for a system of imperfect decision makers?

• How can we create a (feasible) prescriptive theory for systems of imperfect decision makers?

• Can we do this by extending/modifying existing prescriptive theories for perfect decision makers to imperfect decision makers?

• How can we exploit the relation of these problems to the problem of control under varying/uncertain resources’ constraints and to the problem of the computational decision-making?

• What can we learn from natural, engineered, and social systems to help us address these issues?

The topics listed above span both theoretical issues and the development of effective algorithms.

The workshop aims to bring together different scientific communities, to brainstorm on possible research directions, and to encourage collaboration among researchers with complementary ideas and expertise. The workshop will be based on invited talks, contributed talks and posters. Extensive moderated and informal discussions ensure targeted exchange.