Minimax decision rules for planning under uncertainty

Abstract

It is common to use minimax rules to make decisions for planning when there is great uncertainty on what will happen in the future. Minimax regret is one popular version of this. We give an analysis of the behaviour of minimax rules in the case with a finite set of possible future scenarios. The use of minimax rules avoids the need to determine probabilities for each scenario, which is an attractive feature in many public sector settings. However, minimax rules will have sensitivity to the choice of scenarios. In many cases using a minimax approach will mean the requirement for what may be regarded as arbitrary probabilities on scenarios is replaced by a similarly arbitrary choice of a very small number of specific scenarios. We investigate this phenomenon. When regret-based rules are used there are also problems arising since the independence of irrelevant alternatives property fails, which can lead to opportunities to game the process. Our analysis of these phenomena considers cases where the decision variables are chosen from a convex set in $R^n$, as well as cases with a finite set of decision choices.