Re: ?Value of information without utilities?

Bob Welch (bwelch@gensym.com)
Tue, 25 May 1999 08:55:36 -0600

>I don't believe this is what is needed. For any information measure,
>value-based or not, one should easily be able to specify a decision
>structure and a *different* value function v such that the original
>information measure clashes with information-value-under-v, and therefore
>gives wrong decisions. A result to this effect doesn't seem particularly
>interesting.
>

Sorry, my recall is imperfect. Arrow's result is an extension of the
Blackwell theorem that the only utility of money function in which the value
of information is independent of the rewards is the logarithmic and
corresponds exactly with the Shannon measure of information. Ken Arrow,
The value of and demand for information, Chapter 6 in C.B. McGuire and R.
Radner, Decision and Organization and reprinted in a volume of Arrow's
collected works, Essays in the theory of risk bearing.

Often, it seems, that people want to use valueless measures of information
to avoid the rather difficult issues in assessing value. I am very
uncomfortable with a medical decision process (as in this case the
originator of this thread) that does not attempt to obtain information about
value from the patient.