cs.CEMay 4, 2026

The Design and Composition of Structural Causal Decision Processes

Authors: Sebastian Benthall, Alan Lujan

Organizations: International Computer Science Institute, USA · New York University, USA · Johns Hopkins University, Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, USA

Abstract

We present two new classes of causal models of decision-making agents. Our approach is motivated by the needs of modeling the economics of computing systems. These systems are composed of subsystems and can exhibit endogenous limits on cognitive resources and value discounting. Structural Causal Decision Models (SCDMs) expand on Structural Causal Influence Models. Like SCIMs, they explicitly represent the causal relationships between model variables and the payoffs of agent decisions. Additionally, agent decisions can be constrained by their causal antecedents, and SCDMs can have open root variables for which no probability distribution or structural equation is given. We show that SCDMs have a well-defined and computationally useful property of composability. Building on SCDMs, we then define a Structural Causal Decision Process (SCDP) as a recurring SCDM with a discount variable. SCDPs benefit from the useful composition properties of SCDMs. Moreover, SCDPs are strictly more expressive than POMDPs because they do not assume rational belief formation. Indeed, an SCDP can endogenously model the memory-formation process, and is thus useful for modeling resource rational agents in dynamic settings. SCDPs are also capable of modeling variable discounting, a tool used widely in social scientific modeling. We pose that SCDPs are a useful framework for policy simulation for the digital economy, mechanism design for information systems, and digital twin modeling of cyberinfrastructure.

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