Decision Making under Uncertainity
The course studies stochastic control and communication through one broader lens: decision making under uncertainty. The same lens also covers team decision theory, collaborative decision making, economics, and organization theory.
Course Outline
Course Arc
This course treats several apparently different subjects as instances of the same problem template:
- a decision maker must choose from a set of alternatives
- some relevant variable is unknown at decision time
- the decision may have different consequences in different scenarios
- the available information changes the structure and difficulty of the problem
- risk appears because outcomes vary across possible scenarios
The goal is to understand how decisions, uncertainty, information, and dynamics interact.
Core Themes
| Theme | Question |
|---|---|
| Decisions | What action, variable, or policy should be chosen? |
| Uncertainty | What is unknown when the decision is made? |
| Risk | How should downside outcomes and variable consequences be evaluated? |
| Information | Who knows what, when is it known, and how is it revealed or transmitted? |
| Dynamics | How do current decisions affect future states and observations? |
Key Takeaway
Stochastic control, communication, team theory, and economic decision problems are not isolated topics. They can be studied as variations of a single framework: choosing actions under incomplete information, while accounting for risk, information flow, and dynamics.