UncertaintyUncertainty refers to epistemic situations involving imperfect or unknown information. It applies to predictions of future events, to physical measurements that are already made, or to the unknown. Uncertainty arises in partially observable or stochastic environments, as well as due to ignorance, indolence, or both. It arises in any number of fields, including insurance, philosophy, physics, statistics, economics, finance, medicine, psychology, sociology, engineering, metrology, meteorology, ecology and information science.
Optimal decisionAn optimal decision is a decision that leads to at least as good a known or expected outcome as all other available decision options. It is an important concept in decision theory. In order to compare the different decision outcomes, one commonly assigns a utility value to each of them. If there is uncertainty as to what the outcome will be but knowledge about the distribution of the uncertainty, then under the von Neumann–Morgenstern axioms the optimal decision maximizes the expected utility (a probability–weighted average of utility over all possible outcomes of a decision).
Pyramide des besoinsPyramide des besoins La pyramide des besoins, dite pyramide de Maslow, est une représentation pyramidale de la hiérarchie des besoins qui interprète la théorie de la motivation basée à partir des observations réalisées dans les par le psychologue Abraham Maslow. L'article où Maslow expose pour la première fois sa théorie, A Theory of Human Motivation, est paru en 1943. Celle-ci souffre toutefois de n'avoir jamais pu prouver de lien de causalité entre les besoins qu'elle présente.
