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July 13, 20260 citationsOpen Access

Information Value Under Endogenous Feasibility

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ALAlex Li

Key Points

  • The aim is to analyze how past actions affect an agent's future decision-making and expected rewards under uncertainty.
  • Introduced the Irreversibility Decision Problem with stochastic edge blocking in action graphs.
  • Established a two-route construction to demonstrate how payoff precision affects expected terminal rewards.
  • Explored the effects of cognitive-depth parameters on welfare in relation to payoff precision.
  • Demonstrated that higher payoff precision can decrease expected terminal rewards when focusing on immediate rewards.
  • Provided conditions under which welfare can either increase or decrease with improved payoff precision.
  • Identified that non-monotonicity in welfare is attributed to objective misspecification rather than failures in Blackwell's comparison theorem.

Abstract

This paper studies payoff information when past choices constrain future feasible actions. We introduce the Irreversibility Decision Problem, in which an agent navigates an action graph subject to stochastic edge blocking. Along a Blackwell-ordered Gaussian signal family, greater payoff precision can lower expected terminal reward when the agent ranks immediate rewards rather than continuation values. A two-route construction establishes this reversal, and a general-graph extension gives sufficient conditions for it. On depth-d trap trees, the probability of correct navigation decays exponentially in d. A cognitive-depth parameter determines whether welfare is increasing or decreasing in payoff precision; sufficient knowledge of the feasibility graph restores monotonicity. A welfare decomposition separates signal-invariant reachability loss from the agent-dependent residual. On percolated networks, giant-component membership determines when reachability loss vanishes conditionally, while persistent local isolation prevents population-average loss from vanishing. The results attribute non-monotonicity to objective misspecification, not to a failure of Blackwell's comparison theorem.

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Cite This Study

Alex Li (2026) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/6a54807d475c38bf615a55a0https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21315901
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