The description of how sequential choice can be defined is helpful, I was previously confused by how this was supposed to work. This matches what I meant by preferences over tuples of outcomes. Thanks!
We’d incorrectly rule out the possibility that the agent goes for (B+,B).
There’s two things we might want from the idea of incomplete preferences:
To predict the actions of agents.
Because complete agents behave dangerously sometimes, and we want to design better agents with different behaviour.
I think modelling an agent as having incomplete preferences is great for (1). Very useful. We make better predictions if we don’t rule out the possibility that the agent goes for B after choosing B+. I think we agree here.
For (2), the relevant quote is:
As a general point, you can always look at a decision ex post and back out different ways to rationalise it. The nontrivial task is here prediction, using features of the agent.
If we can always rationalise a decision ex post as being generated by a complete agent, then let’s just build that complete agent. Incompleteness isn’t helping us, because the behaviour could have been generated by complete preferences.
The description of how sequential choice can be defined is helpful, I was previously confused by how this was supposed to work. This matches what I meant by preferences over tuples of outcomes. Thanks!
There’s two things we might want from the idea of incomplete preferences:
To predict the actions of agents.
Because complete agents behave dangerously sometimes, and we want to design better agents with different behaviour.
I think modelling an agent as having incomplete preferences is great for (1). Very useful. We make better predictions if we don’t rule out the possibility that the agent goes for B after choosing B+. I think we agree here.
For (2), the relevant quote is:
If we can always rationalise a decision ex post as being generated by a complete agent, then let’s just build that complete agent. Incompleteness isn’t helping us, because the behaviour could have been generated by complete preferences.