The Foundations of Causal Decision Theory

This book defends the view that any adequate account of rational decision making must take a decision maker's beliefs about causal relations into account. The early chapters of the book introduce the nonspecialist to the rudiments of expected utility theory. The major technical advance offered by the book is a "representation theorem" that shows that both causal decision theory and its main rival, Richard Jeffrey's logic of decision, are instances of a more general conditional decision theory. The book solves a long-standing problem for Jeffrey's theory by showing for the first time how to obtain a unique utility and probability representation for preferences and judgments of comparative likelihood. The book also contains a major new discussion of what it means to suppose that some event occurs or that some proposition is true. The book will be of interest to a broad range of readers in philosophy, economics, psychology, mathematics, and artificial intelligence.