Decision Making Under Uncertainty When Preference Information Is Incomplete
Benjamin Armbruster, Erick Delage
Management Science · 2015 · Volume 61 · Issue 1
Abstract
We consider the problem of optimal decision making under uncertainty but assume that the decision maker’s utility function is not completely known. Instead, we consider all the utilities that meet some criteria, such as preferring certain lotteries over other lotteries and being risk averse, S-shaped, or prudent. These criteria extend the ones used in the first- and second-order stochastic dominance framework. We then give tractable formulations for such decision-making problems. We formulate them as robust utility maximization problems, as optimization problems with stochastic dominance constraints, and as robust certainty equivalent maximization problems. We use a portfolio allocation problem to illustrate our results. This paper was accepted by Dimitris Bertsimas, optimization.
Keywords
expected utility, robust optimization, stochastic dominance, certainty equivalent
Enable JavaScript for citation tools and additional paper interactions.