The information problem, though far from being settled, is the central one of decision-making. The expected utility problem should therefore always be seen in connection with the information problem.
2. THE MEANING OF "INFORMATION"
According to the original colloquial meaning information is a communication or a message which is -within a certain context -of value to somebody.
A scientific pre-definition could therefore be: Information is the shaping of data or facts, etc., so that it is (within a certain context) useful for a user, be he a scientist or a practical man, or an administrator (i.e., often, particularly in official statistics, a hybrid form of the two others). This meaning branches out in transmission and interpretation and includes both the methods as well as the results (of transmission or interpretation resp.).
Seiffert (1971) tells the fate of the word "information" since roman times, e.g., that the original pedagogical side-meaning disappeared and that only one aspect of the original meaning (the one ! mentioned before) preserved up to our times, more precisely up to 1948 when Shannon used the word in the well-defined but narrow engineering sense. In order to restore part of the original meaning the notion of semantic information came up (cf., e.g., Carnap and Bar-Hillel, 1953), as opposed to the technical meaning. Yet, we find syntactic and pragmatic notions as well. And we find quantified and non-quantified and empirical and theoretical notions. According to these criteria let me give you a very short overview of the main present-day concepts of information.
In statistics, Fisher's (1936) notion of the amount of information refers to a parameter estimated from a sample of independent observations, virtually