---
title: "Great Expectations. Part I: On the Customizability of Generalized Expected Utility"
authors:
  - "Francis C. Chu"
  - "Joseph Y. Halpern"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2003/43"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/2003/0043.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 2003
pages: "291-295"
track: ""
keywords:
---

# Great Expectations. Part I: On the Customizability of Generalized Expected Utility

Francis C. Chu, Joseph Y. Halpern

*Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 291-295.

## Abstract

We propose a generalization of expected utilit_y that we call generalized EU (GEU), where a decision maker's beliefs are represented by plausibility measures and the decision maker's tastes are represented by general (i.e., not necessarily realvalued) utility functions. We show that every agent, "rational" or not, can be modeled as a GEU maxImizer. We then show that we can customize GEU by selectively imposing just the constraints we want. In particular, by show how of Savage's postulates corresponds to constraints on GEU.