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Popular Culture Review
the maximum expected utility. However, in many situations inadequate
information may make it impossible to assign probabilities or estimate utilities
with certainty or near certainty. The approach also takes no account of risk
aversion.
In response, weaker principles have been adopted, such as the minimax
(maximin) principle which recommends choice of the action which has, as its
worst outcome, a consequence which is better than the worst consequence of
any alternative action. The principle is often criticized as being too conservative
except in a small class of situations (zero sum games in which one's opponents
are rational).
One of the main problems facing decision theory is that there is no
adequately accepted notion of what is involved in rational decisions. Attempts
have been made to develop axioms (assumptions) which any intuitive c ۘ