Dagon: You can artificially bound utility to some arbitrarily low “bankruptcy” point. The lack of a natural one isn’t relevant to the question of whether a utility function makes sense here. On treating utility as a resource, if you can make decisions to increase or decrease utility, then you can play the game. Your basic assumption seems to be that people can’t meaningfully make decisions that change utility, at which point there is no point in measuring it, as there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
The point of unintuitive high utilities and upper-bounded utilities I believe deserves another post.
Dagon: You can artificially bound utility to some arbitrarily low “bankruptcy” point. The lack of a natural one isn’t relevant to the question of whether a utility function makes sense here. On treating utility as a resource, if you can make decisions to increase or decrease utility, then you can play the game. Your basic assumption seems to be that people can’t meaningfully make decisions that change utility, at which point there is no point in measuring it, as there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
The point of unintuitive high utilities and upper-bounded utilities I believe deserves another post.