I think UDT as you specified it has utility functions. What do you mean by doesn’t have independence? I am advocating for an updateless agent model that might strictly prefer a mixture between outcomes A and B to either A or B deterministically. I think an agent model with this property should not be described as having a “utility.” Maybe I am conflating “utility” with expected utility maximization/VNM and you are meaning something more general?
If you mean by utility something more general than utility as used in EUM, then I think it is mostly a terminological issue.
I think I endorse the word “utility” without any qualifiers as referring to EUM. In part because I think that is how it is used, and in part because EUM is nice enough to deserve the word utility.
Even if EUM doesn’t get “utility”, I think it at least gets “utility function”, since “function” implies cardinal utility rather than ordinal utility and I think people almost always mean EUM when talking about cardinal utility.
I personally care about cardinal utility, where the magnitude of the utility is information about how to aggregate rather than information about how to take lotteries, but I think this is a very small minority usage of cardinal utility, so I don’t think it should change the naming convention very much.
I think UDT as you specified it has utility functions. What do you mean by doesn’t have independence? I am advocating for an updateless agent model that might strictly prefer a mixture between outcomes A and B to either A or B deterministically. I think an agent model with this property should not be described as having a “utility.” Maybe I am conflating “utility” with expected utility maximization/VNM and you are meaning something more general?
If you mean by utility something more general than utility as used in EUM, then I think it is mostly a terminological issue.
I think I endorse the word “utility” without any qualifiers as referring to EUM. In part because I think that is how it is used, and in part because EUM is nice enough to deserve the word utility.
Even if EUM doesn’t get “utility”, I think it at least gets “utility function”, since “function” implies cardinal utility rather than ordinal utility and I think people almost always mean EUM when talking about cardinal utility.
I personally care about cardinal utility, where the magnitude of the utility is information about how to aggregate rather than information about how to take lotteries, but I think this is a very small minority usage of cardinal utility, so I don’t think it should change the naming convention very much.