Decision Making with Multiple Imperfect Decision Makers

at the 25^th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS-11)

Friday, December 16, 2011 

 Sierra Nevada, Spain 

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

Prescriptive Bayesian decision making supported by the efficient theoretically well-founded algorithms is known to be a powerful tool.  However, its application within multiple-participants’ settings needs an efficient support of imperfect participant (decision maker, agent), which is characterised by limited cognitive, acting and evaluative resources.

The interacting and multiple-task-solving participants prevail in the natural (societal, biological) systems and become more and more important in the artificial (engineering) systems. Knowledge of conditions and mechanisms influencing the participant’s individual behaviour is a prerequisite to better understanding and rational improving of these systems. The diverse research communities permanently address these topics focusing either on theoretical aspects of the problem or (more often) on practical solution within a particular application.  However, different terminology and methodologies used significantly impede further exploitation of any advances occurred. The workshop will bring the experts from different scientific communities to complement and generalise the knowledge gained relying on the multi-disciplinary wisdom. It extends the list of problems of the preceding NIPS workshop:       

How should we formalise rational decision making of a single imperfect decision maker? Does the answer change for interacting imperfect decision makers? How can we create a feasible prescriptive theory for systems of imperfect decision makers?

The workshop especially welcomes contributions addressing the following questions:

What can we learn from natural, engineered, and social systems? How emotions influence decision making? How to present complex prescriptive outcomes to the human?  Do common algorithms really support imperfect decision makers? What is the impact of imperfect designers of decision-making systems?

The workshop aims to brainstorm on promising research directions, present relevant case studies and theoretical results, 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.