lukeprog comments on Terminology suggestion: Say "degrees utility" instead of "utils" to prompt affine thinking - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Sniffnoy 19 May 2013 08:03AM

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Comment author: lukeprog 18 May 2013 10:45:25PM 4 points [-]

The OP and the parent comment are about the utility functions given by the von Neumann-Morgenstern theorem; these are left invariant by any affine rescaling and (by the uniqueness part of the theorem) are changed by any non-affine rescaling.

It's worth mentioning that all three kinds of utility functions can be constructed: ordinal scale, interval scale, and ratio scale. For an overview of ratio scale utility functions, see Peterson (2009), pp. 106-110.