Note—Disutility as a Probability: An Interpretation of Weighted Informational Measures

It is shown that the proposal for a utility-weighted informational measure discussed by Belis, and Guiasu (Belis, M., S. Guiasu. 1968. A quantitative-qualitative measure of information in cybernetic systems. IEEE Trans. Information Theory14 593–594.) and others can be formulated in terms of classical (unweighted) information theory by interpreting utilities or disutilities as probabilities. Aggregation properties and extensions to prior and posterior probabilities are also discussed.