Thinking and Deciding in a Complex World

Early ‘paradoxical’ findings in decision theory, such as Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes, revealed an existence of preference reversals and non-neutral attitudes to subjective risks that cannot be mathematically captured via the formula of total probability, thus showing that agents’ decision making is at variance with the classical probabilistic information processing mode. In this paper, we discuss in more detail the decision making contexts pertaining to non-consequential reasoning, and how these instances of non-classical preferences can be described, and also quantified with the aid of alternative frameworks based on quantum probability theory. We consider the major challenges to a unified “quantum-like” framework of thinking and deciding under uncertainty and risk and elaborate on some successful solutions.