Agents immune to money pumps and dominated strategies maximize expected utility.
3 events · 1 assessment · 1 decision
Assessed without decomposition
Budget exhausted at turn 1; recorded doubtful assessment from background knowledge, importance 0.45, contestation 0.6. Decomposition (per-axiom necessity for money-pump immunity) deferred to a funded later pass.
Assessed Doubtful
verdict confidence 0.60 · credence 0.30
The claim restates the coherence or "money pump" argument for expected utility theory: an agent that cannot be money-pumped and never picks a dominated strategy must act as an expected utility maximizer. The von Neumann–Morgenstern theorem shows something narrower. Preferences that satisfy completeness, transitivity, continuity and independence can be represented by an expected utility function. To get from there to the claim, every one of those axioms would need to be required for avoiding exploitation, and that step is disputed. Agents with incomplete preferences can block money pumps by following simple decision rules, such as refusing trades that their earlier choices make dispreferred, without completing their preferences (Thornley 2023 and related work). The case for independence and continuity as requirements of non-exploitability is also weaker than the case for transitivity. The claim holds only under strong idealizations, such as completeness taken as given. As stated, it is doubtful.
Claim entered the graph