Recent research in neuroscience suggests that utility is cardinal. This focuses attention on the adaptation of utility, as plausibly arises from a limited capacity to make fine distinctions. The present focus is on real time adaptation. The simple mechanism proposed adapts to an arbitrary...

Recent research in neuroscience suggests that utility is cardinal. This focuses attention on the adaptation of utility, as plausibly arises from a limited capacity to make fine distinctions. The present focus is on real time adaptation. The simple mechanism proposed adapts to an arbitrary...

Consider the possible biological origin of the expected utility criterion. On the one hand, if individuals possess a utility function stemming from the rate of production of expected offspring, they can rapidly adapt to arbitrary unknown distributions in a bandit problem. Embedding such a...