Prospect Theoretic Utility Based Human Decision Making in Multi-Agent Systems

This paper studies human decision making via a utility based approach in a binary hypothesis testing framework that includes the consideration of individual behavioral disparity. Unlike rational decision makers who make decisions so as to maximize their expected utility, humans tend to maximize their subjective utilities, which are usually distorted due to cognitive biases. We use the value function and the probability weighting function from prospect theory to model human cognitive biases and obtain their subjective utility function in decision making. First, we show that the decision rule which maximizes the subjective utility function reduces to a likelihood ratio test (LRT). Second, to capture the unreliable nature of human decision making behavior, we model the decision threshold of a human as a Gaussian random variable, whose mean is determined by his/her cognitive bias, and the variance represents the uncertainty of the agent while making a decision. This human decision making framework under behavioral biases incorporates both cognitive biases and uncertainties. We consider several decision fusion scenarios that include humans. Extensive numerical results are provided throughout the paper to illustrate the impact of human behavioral biases on the performance of the decision making systems.