Utility Independence in a Qualitative Decision Theory

Qualitative accounts of utility modeling and decision theory o er the prospect of rea soning about preference and decision making without requiring hard to obtain numerical probabilities and utilities It is plausible that such accounts can be found because qualita tive criteria in particular dominance seems to play a large role in human decision making the formal quantitative apparatus of maxi mum expected utility tends to be invoked only in the most critical most nely balanced cases In this paper we show how non probabilistic independence concepts such as preferential independence and utility independence can be integrated with other sources of quantita tive information It turns out that there are some subtleties involved in making sense of these ideas in a logical framework The main contribution of this paper is to demonstrate these subtleties and then give semantics that avoid many of the problems We then argue that knowledge of utility independence can be a useful addition to the qualitative rea soner s tool kit