论文标题
当前偏见的优化
Present-Biased Optimization
论文作者
论文摘要
本文探讨了当前有偏见的代理人的行为,即,与实际成本相比,错误地预期未来行动的成本。具体而言,该论文扩展了Akerlof(1991)提出的原始框架,用于研究与时间不合时宜的计划有关的各个方面,包括拖延和遗弃,以及封装了Kleinberg and Oren(2014)最近提出的典型的图形理论模型。此扩展的好处是双重的。首先,它可以根据必须执行的优化任务对当前偏见剂的行为进行细粒度分析。特别是,我们研究了涵盖任务与击打任务的涵盖,并表明由当前偏见的代理计算的解决方案成本与最佳解决方案的成本之间的比率可能取决于问题限制。其次,我们的扩展使不仅可以研究未来成本的低估,再加上最小化问题,而且还可以研究最小化/最大化的所有组合,以及低估/高估。我们研究了四种情况,并建立了其中三个方案的上限(已知原始方案的成本比无限),就当前偏见的代理的行为提供了完整的全球图片,就优化任务而言。
This paper explores the behavior of present-biased agents, that is, agents who erroneously anticipate the costs of future actions compared to their real costs. Specifically, the paper extends the original framework proposed by Akerlof (1991) for studying various aspects of human behavior related to time-inconsistent planning, including procrastination, and abandonment, as well as the elegant graph-theoretic model encapsulating this framework recently proposed by Kleinberg and Oren (2014). The benefit of this extension is twofold. First, it enables to perform fine grained analysis of the behavior of present-biased agents depending on the optimisation task they have to perform. In particular, we study covering tasks vs. hitting tasks, and show that the ratio between the cost of the solutions computed by present-biased agents and the cost of the optimal solutions may differ significantly depending on the problem constraints. Second, our extension enables to study not only underestimation of future costs, coupled with minimization problems, but also all combinations of minimization/maximization, and underestimation/overestimation. We study the four scenarios, and we establish upper bounds on the cost ratio for three of them (the cost ratio for the original scenario was known to be unbounded), providing a complete global picture of the behavior of present-biased agents, as far as optimisation tasks are concerned.