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- Agent
The single decision-making entity whose preferences, constraints, and information define the choice problem.
- Action
A selectable alternative available to the agent.
- Preference
The evaluative relation the agent uses to rank actions or outcomes.
- Constraint
A limiting condition that restricts which actions are feasible.
- Information
The informational content available to the agent at the moment of choice.
- Preference Intensity
The strength with which the agent favors one option over another.
- Resource Quantity
The amount of budget, time, or inputs available to the agent.
- Outcome Magnitude
The level of payoff, consumption, or benefit generated by an action.
- Preference Ordering
The structured ranking the agent uses to compare alternatives.
- Feasible Set Geometry
The structure of the action space permitted by constraints.
- Information Partition
The organization of what the agent can distinguish or know at the point of choice.
- Internal State Evolution
How the agent’s own state changes over time in the absence of interaction.
- Learning Within the Agent
Updates to beliefs or evaluations based solely on the agent’s own experience.
- Time Preference
How the agent weights future outcomes relative to present ones.
- Budget Constraint
The limit imposed by finite resources.
- Technological Constraint
The restriction imposed by available methods or production possibilities.
- Time Constraint
Limits on action imposed by temporal availability.
- Feasibility Condition
The physical or logical admissibility of actions.
- Belief Distribution
The agent’s internal probabilistic assessment of uncertain states.
- Information Quality
The precision or noisiness of the agent’s information.
- Perceived Uncertainty
The agent’s subjective understanding of unknowns.
- Utility / Value
The evaluative assignment of desirability to outcomes.
- Risk Attitude
The agent’s disposition toward uncertainty.
- Intertemporal Preference
The agent’s valuation of outcomes across time.
- Non-Cardinal Evaluation Criteria
Any qualitative or ordinal standard of “better vs worse” used by the agent.
- Income
A conserved monetary inflow available to the agent over a decision period.
- Wealth
An accumulated stock of financial or real assets constraining current and future choice.
- Information State
The total informational content available to the agent at a given moment.
- Consumption Bundle
The allocation of quantities across goods or actions chosen by the agent.
- Probability Distribution
The agent’s subjective belief over possible outcomes or states of the world.
- Expectation
A structured summary of beliefs about future states, prices, or outcomes.
- Discount Factor
A scalar quantity weighting future outcomes relative to present ones.
- Risk Parameter
A scalar describing sensitivity to uncertainty in evaluation.
- Price
A valuation signal assigning relative scarcity to goods or actions.
- Marginal Utility
The incremental change in evaluation from a small change in consumption or state.
- Shadow Value
The intensity associated with a binding constraint at the optimum.
- Effort Level
The rate of exertion or activity chosen by the agent per unit time.
- Production Level
The rate at which output is generated from effort or inputs.
- Completeness
The requirement that any two feasible alternatives are comparable or indifferent.
- Transitivity
The requirement that preference orderings are internally consistent and non-cyclical.
- Feasibility
The admissibility condition restricting choices to the feasible set.
- Optimality (Non-Domination)
The condition that a chosen option is not strictly worse than any feasible alternative.
- Choice Consistency
The requirement that choices do not contradict across overlapping opportunity sets.
- Representability
The condition under which preferences admit a utility representation.
- Local Non-Satiation
The condition that arbitrarily close preferred alternatives exist.
- Optimality Condition
The extremal condition characterizing optimal choices under differentiability.
- Comparative Statics Relation
The systematic directional relationship between parameter changes and choice responses.
- Stochastic Consistency
The internal regularity constraints governing probabilistic choice behavior.
- Preference Comparison
The process by which admissible alternatives are evaluated relative to an ordering over outcomes.
- Constraint Filtering
The process of eliminating inadmissible alternatives prior to selection.
- Optimization / Selection
The process of selecting a non-dominated alternative from the feasible set.
- Revealed Choice Mapping
The process of inferring stable choice relations from observed selections.
- Stochastic Selection
The process by which alternatives are selected probabilistically under a stable choice structure.