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| Preface | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Normative and descriptive decision theory | |
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| Rational and right decisions | |
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| Risk, ignorance and uncertainty | |
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| Social choice theory and game theory | |
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| A very brief history of decision theory | |
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| The decision matrix | |
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| States | |
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| Outcomes | |
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| Acts | |
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| Rival formalisations | |
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| Decisions under ignorance | |
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| Dominance | |
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| Maximin and leximin | |
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| Maximax and the optimism-pessimism rule | |
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| Minimax regret | |
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| The principle of insufficient reason | |
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| Randomised acts | |
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| Decisions under risk | |
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| Maximising what? | |
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| Why is it rational to maximise expected utility? | |
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| The axiomatic approach | |
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| Allais' paradox | |
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| Ellsberg's paradox | |
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| The St Petersburg paradox | |
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| The two-envelope paradox | |
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| Utility | |
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| How to construct an ordinal scale | |
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| von Neumann and Morgenstern's interval scale | |
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| Can utility be measured on a ratio scale? | |
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| Can we define utility without being able to measure it? | |
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| The mathematics of probability | |
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| The probability calculus | |
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| Conditional probability | |
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| Bayes' theorem | |
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| The problem of unknown priors | |
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| The philosophy of probability | |
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| The classical interpretation | |
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| The frequency interpretation | |
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| The propensity interpretation | |
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| Logical and epistemic interpretations | |
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| Subjective probability | |
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| Why should we accept the preference axioms? | |
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| Must a rational preference be transitive? | |
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| Must a rational preference be complete? | |
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| The multi-attribute approach | |
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| Must a rational preference satisfy the independence axiom? | |
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| Risk aversion | |
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| Causal vs. evidential decision theory | |
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| Newcomb's problem | |
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| Causal decision theory | |
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| Evidential decision theory | |
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| Bayesian vs. non-Bayesian decision theory | |
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| What is Bayesianism? | |
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| Arguments for and against Bayesianism | |
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| Non-Bayesian approaches | |
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| Game theory I: Basic concepts and zero-sum games | |
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| The prisoner's dilemma | |
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| A taxonomy of games | |
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| Common knowledge and dominance reasoning | |
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| Two-person zero-sum games | |
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| Mixed strategies and the minimax theorem | |
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| Game theory II: Nonzero-sum and cooperative games | |
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| The Nash equilibrium | |
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| The battle of the sexes and chicken | |
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| The bargaining problem | |
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| Iterated games | |
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| Game theory and evolution | |
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| Game theory and ethics | |
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| Social choice theory | |
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| The social choice problem | |
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| Arrow's impossibility theorem | |
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| Sen on liberalism and the Pareto principle | |
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| Harsanyi's utilitarian theorems | |
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| Overview of descriptive decision theory | |
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| Observed violations of the expected utility principle | |
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| Prospect theory | |
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| Violations of transitivity and completeness | |
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| The relevance of descriptive decision theory | |
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| Glossary | |
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| Proof of the von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem | |
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| Further reading | |
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| Index | |