Cost and Actual Causation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new definition of actual causation focused on minimizing intervention costs, emphasizing features like nonredundant sufficiency, continuity, and abnormality, and validates it against real-world cases.

Contribution

It proposes a novel causation definition based on cost minimization principles and demonstrates its effectiveness over existing models in empirical case analysis.

Findings

The new definition aligns better with intuition than previous models.

It effectively captures causation in 66 real-world cases.

Features like nonredundant sufficiency improve causal inference accuracy.

Abstract

I propose the purpose our concept of actual causation serves is minimizing various cost in intervention practice. Actual causation has three features: nonredundant sufficiency, continuity and abnormality; these features correspond to the minimization of exploitative cost, exploratory cost and risk cost in intervention practice. Incorporating these three features, a definition of actual causation is given. I test the definition in 66 causal cases from actual causation literature and show that this definition's application fit intuition better than some other causal modelling based definitions.