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Risk aversion

Posted By: Timothy Chow
Date: Thursday, 30 July 2009, at 3:27 a.m.

This is my first post to this forum. I was redirected here from rec.games.backgammon by someone who thought I might get more useful responses here.

I'm wondering if anyone has considered implementing risk aversion as an option in a bot.

Here's one motivation. Suppose I'm in the box in a chouettes game and the cubes have been turned a few times. The stakes might be high enough to make me risk averse. That is, I would prefer a move that wins with high probability and low variance to a move with higher expected value but higher variance. If I want to train myself ahead of time to be prepared for such situations, then I need a bot that understands risk aversion. During a rollout, the bot needs to play my side in a consistently risk-averse fashion.

One difficulty is that accurate modeling of human risk aversion is a tricky process. As a first approximation, though, one could attach a penalty to high variance. (This amounts to assuming that risk-averse behavior is equivalent to risk-neutral behavior with a suitably adjusted utility function; this assumption doesn't quite match human behavior but is better than nothing.)

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