12 Information Categories and Decentralized Decisions

Intrinsic comparison, asynchronous events, local decisions, and global consistency

Chapter 9 replaced the global clock by an information category and showed why a counterfactual policy must be evaluated on its own induced closed-loop history. We now make the comparator itself structural. The basic move is descent: declare which distinctions in the information category a reference policy is allowed to retain, and ask whether a trajectory descends through that declaration.