Confidence

Here are some resources relevant to a project on confidence and its role in decision and learning that I have been undertaking for the last few years:

Research papers

Published papers belonging to this project include

• A non-technical introduction and philosophical defense: Confidence in Beliefs and Rational Decision Making.
• Technical decision-theory papers, basically about how to incorporate confidence in beliefs into choice: Confidence and Decision and Incomplete Preferences and Confidence.
• Normatively, the strongest argument against the confidence approach (and any non-Bayesian approach) comes in the form of a set of dynamic arguments. I argue that they are based on a (simple) mistake and debunk them here: Dynamic consistency and ambiguity: A reappraisal.
• A paper on uncertainty reporting and evidence: Confidence in belief, weight of evidence and uncertainty reporting.
• Papers on applications to climate decision and uncertainty reporting (with R. Bradley and C. Helgeson): Climate Change Assessments: Confidence, Probability and Decision and Combining probability with qualitative degree-of-certainty metrics in assessment.
• A paper about how to update confidence in beliefs. Take-home message: incorporate confidence into update resolves many problems with standard update rules (including Bayesian conditionnalisation): Updating confidence in beliefs.
• Extensions to confidence in preferences (other papers focus on confidence in beliefs): Confidence in Preferences.

For work in progress, see here.

This page contains brief introductions to some of this research.

Slides and videos

Slides presenting some of this research can be found here. See here for a video of a presentation of the projects prepared for a general audience.

A French National Research Agency-funded project

Some details on the DUSUCA project (Decision-Making & Belief Change Under Severe Uncertainty: A Confidence-Based Approach) are available here.

A Confidence Elicitation & Presentation tool

The beta version of a web tool for eliciting or reporting and presenting confidence in beliefs is available here.