Study on information utility

摘要

Information has two aspects. One aspect is the objective one; another aspect is the subjective one. Shannon has discussed the objective aspect of information in information theory. But the subjective aspect of information has not been fully discussed. Someone use "Bayesian approaches" to evaluate the value of information. But in some cases it does not meet the information user's need. This paper is focus on the subjective aspect of objectively measurable information and gives formal definitions for information, information utility, and marginal information utility, normalized calculation of information utility. The information discussed in the paper has interdisciplinary nature. This work can be the foundation of many application areas.