Expected utility has a lot of nice properties and is the simplest decision system that's completely consistent. Other decision systems tend to have flaws that c

Expected utility has a lot of nice properties and is the simplest decision system that's completely consistent. Other decision systems tend to have flaws that can be exploited to take all their money, if you are allowed to make bets with them. However expected utility has really weird edge cases. Like Pascal's Mugging - events with essentially infinite utility and infinitesimal probability. These don't occur very often in everyday life. But programming an AI to follow expected utility to the letter, might have some weird consequences. If you allow slightly more complexity, you can get decision systems a bit more complicated that avoid this problem, and are still consistent. E.g. "median utility". This itself has problems, like ignoring slightly unlikely outcomes that are really bad or really good. But you can fix that too by adding a bit more complexity. I wrote about how to do this here: http://houshalter.tumblr.com/post/129690629075/against-expected-utility http://houshalter.tumblr.com/post/129690629075/against-expec... This system might be preferable to expected utility. E.g. if you were to play a lottery that had a jackpot so large the expected utility was positive (even after adjusting for the logarithmic utility of money.) It still might be preferable to not buy just to buy just one ticket, because you will still almost certainly lose. But if you had the option to buy many tickets, the odds of winning might increase enough to be worth it.