Decision Theory
@MCMP Summer School for Widening Participation in Mathematical Philosophy 2026
Instructor: Xueyin (Snow) Zhang (UC Berkeley)
@MCMP Summer School for Widening Participation in Mathematical Philosophy 2026
Instructor: Xueyin (Snow) Zhang (UC Berkeley)
This is the website for the MCMP Summer School Lecture Series on Decision Theory! Here you will find the daily schedule, lecture slides, and references to the relevant literature. Below, you can also read a description of the course, see what prerequisites we ask for (virtually none :), and find my email address, in case you have any questions for me.
I look forward to meeting you all!
We make decisions all the time—what to have for breakfast, how to go to school, where to go for vacations, whether to pursue a PhD in philosophy. But how should we make decisions? And why? This is an introductory course to the philosophical foundations of decision theory. The topics we will discuss include: rational choice theory, axiomatic representations of expected utility theory, decision theories that accommodate aversion to risk and/or ambiguity, causal vs. evidential decision theory and decision theory for agents with limited cognitive resources.
Slides:
Day 1: Introduction
Day 2: Rational choice theory
Day 3 & 4: EU theory
Day 5: CDT vs. EDT
Xuyein Snow Zhang is an assistant professor at UC Berkeley. You can reach me at snowzhang@berkeley.edu and my website is: https://sites.google.com/berkeley.edu/xueyin-snow-zhang