“Paying utility” in this kind of analysis means to undertake negative-utility behaviors outside the game we’re analyzing, in order to achieve better (higher-utility) outcomes in the area we’re discussing. The valuation / bargaining question is about how to identify how important the game is relative to other things.
For simple games, it’s often framed in dollars: “how much would you pay to play a game where you can win X or lose Y with this distribution”, where the amount you’d pay is the value of the game (and it’s assumed, but not stated nearly often enough that the range of outcomes is such that it’s roughly linear to utility for you).
I think this writeup gets a little confusing in not being very explicit about when it’s talking about an agent’s overall utility function, and when it’s talking about a subset of a utility function for a given game. There is never a “willingness to pay” anything that reduces overall utility. The question is willingness to pay in one domain to influence another. This willingness is obviously based entirely on maximizing overall utility.
What does it mean to pay utility?
“Paying utility” in this kind of analysis means to undertake negative-utility behaviors outside the game we’re analyzing, in order to achieve better (higher-utility) outcomes in the area we’re discussing. The valuation / bargaining question is about how to identify how important the game is relative to other things.
For simple games, it’s often framed in dollars: “how much would you pay to play a game where you can win X or lose Y with this distribution”, where the amount you’d pay is the value of the game (and it’s assumed, but not stated nearly often enough that the range of outcomes is such that it’s roughly linear to utility for you).
I think this writeup gets a little confusing in not being very explicit about when it’s talking about an agent’s overall utility function, and when it’s talking about a subset of a utility function for a given game. There is never a “willingness to pay” anything that reduces overall utility. The question is willingness to pay in one domain to influence another. This willingness is obviously based entirely on maximizing overall utility.