Towards foundations of fuzzy utility: Taking fuzziness into account naturally leads to intuitionistic fuzzy degrees

Abstract

The traditional utility-based decision making theory assumes that for every two alternatives, the user is either absolutely sure that the first alternative is better, or that the second alternative is better, or that the two alternatives are absolutely equivalent. In practice, when faced with alternatives of similar value, people are often not fully sure which of these alternatives is better. To describe different possible degrees of confidence, it is reasonable to use fuzzy logic techniques. In this paper, we show that, somewhat surprisingly, a reasonable fuzzy modification of the traditional utility elicitation procedure naturally leads to intuitionistic fuzzy degrees.