Improving Decision-Making on the Basis of Experience

Abstract

This chapter discusses the improvement of decision making on the basis of experience. Decision making in general is subject to a trade-off between the sophistication of the procedure employed to make the decision, and the time and effort required to perform the analysis. Whether a more sophisticated procedure is worth using depends on whether the gain from its superior performance outweighs the extra cost. The key point about such trade-offs in the sophistication of the decision-making process is that, like the decisions themselves, they are highly dependent upon the particular planning environment. In the absence of a theory of the utility of decision-making sophistication as a function of the planning domain, the appropriate level of sophistication for a given domain must be determined empirically. The ability of a planner, in a decision making process, to adapt its decision-making to a domain depends in part upon its ability to optimize the trade-off between the sophistication of its decision procedures and their cost. As it is difficult to optimize this trade-off on a priori grounds alone, a planner should start with a relatively simple set of decision procedures and add complexity in response to experience gained in the application of its decision-making to real-world problems.