This chapter serves as a building block for modeling and solving planning problem that involve more than one decision maker. The focus is on making a single decision in the presence of other decision makers that may interfere with the outcome. The planning problems in Chapters 10 to 12 will be viewed as a sequence of decision-making problems. The ideas presented in this chapter can be viewed as making a one-stage plan. With respect to Chapter 2, the present chapter reduces the number of stages down to one and then introduces more sophisticated ways to model a single stage. Upon returning to multiple stages in Chapter 10, it will quickly be seen that many algorithms from Chapter 2 extend nicely to incorporate the decision-theoretic concepts of this chapter.

Since there is no information to carry across stages, there will be no need for a state space. Instead of designing a plan for a robot, in this chapter we will refer to designing a strategy for a decision maker (DM). The planning problem reduces down to a decision-making problem. In later chapters, which describe sequential decision making, planning terminology will once again be used. It does not seem appropriate yet in this chapter because making a single decision appears too degenerate to be referred to as planning.

A consistent theme throughout Part III will be the interaction of multiple DMs.