Those who interpret utilities in terms of personal preference face a special challenge: the so-called problem of interpersonal utility comparisons.
Classic utilitarians such as Bentham (1789), Mill (1861), and Sidgwick (1907) interpreted utility as a measure of pleasure or happiness.
Yet, the vast majority of prior work has focused on topics like mathematical functions (concave or otherwise) of network metrics, information entropy, or user-perceived quality (e.g., MOS) for interpreting utility.
Broome (1991) interprets utilities as measuring comparisons of objective betterness and worseness, rather than personal preferences: to say that $A$ has a greater utility than $B$ is to say that $A$ is objectively better than $B$.
In fact one can only interpret relative utility differences between scenarios.
17 The students were asked to state probability p* that indicates indifference between the two alternatives A and B. We then used p* to interpret the utility level of the current state of health.
The authors of [18] interpret the utility-based power control problem as a joint optimization of powers and SIR assignment over the feasibility region.
In order to avoid ambiguity in graphical display, a short explanation of how to interpret calculated utilities is given to the users in textual form next to the history graph.
Nevertheless, caution is required when interpreting these utility values since there is no large trial to confirm and validate the health states descriptors.
