IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/mateco/v78y2018icp79-95.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Conditional expected utility criteria for decision making under ignorance or objective ambiguity

Author

Listed:
  • Gravel, Nicolas
  • Marchant, Thierry
  • Sen, Arunava

Abstract

We provide an axiomatic characterization of a family of criteria for ranking completely uncertain and/or ambiguous decisions. A completely uncertain decision is described by the set of all its consequences (assumed to be finite). An ambiguous decision is described as a set of possible probability distributions over a set of prizes. Every criterion in the family compares sets on the basis of their conditional expected utility , for some “likelihood” function taking strictly positive values and some utility function both having the universe of alternatives as their domain.

Suggested Citation

  • Gravel, Nicolas & Marchant, Thierry & Sen, Arunava, 2018. "Conditional expected utility criteria for decision making under ignorance or objective ambiguity," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 78(C), pages 79-95.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:mateco:v:78:y:2018:i:c:p:79-95
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2018.08.001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304406818300879
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.jmateco.2018.08.001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version below or search for a different version of it.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Segal, Uzi, 1990. "Two-Stage Lotteries without the Reduction Axiom," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 58(2), pages 349-377, March.
    2. Ghirardato, Paolo & Maccheroni, Fabio & Marinacci, Massimo, 2004. "Differentiating ambiguity and ambiguity attitude," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 118(2), pages 133-173, October.
    3. Segal, Uzi, 1987. "The Ellsberg Paradox and Risk Aversion: An Anticipated Utility Approach," International Economic Review, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 28(1), pages 175-202, February.
    4. Epstein, Larry G & Zhang, Jiankang, 2001. "Subjective Probabilities on Subjectively Unambiguous Events," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 69(2), pages 265-306, March.
    5. John Broome, 1990. "Bolker-Jeffrey Expected Utility Theory and Axiomatic Utilitarianism," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 57(3), pages 477-502.
    6. Peter Klibanoff & Massimo Marinacci & Sujoy Mukerji, 2005. "A Smooth Model of Decision Making under Ambiguity," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 73(6), pages 1849-1892, November.
    7. Malte Meinshausen & Nicolai Meinshausen & William Hare & Sarah C. B. Raper & Katja Frieler & Reto Knutti & David J. Frame & Myles R. Allen, 2009. "Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C," Nature, Nature, vol. 458(7242), pages 1158-1162, April.
    8. Nitzan, Shmuel I. & Pattanaik, Prasanta K., 1984. "Median-based extensions of an ordering over a set to the power set: An axiomatic characterization," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 252-261, December.
    9. Ghirardato, Paolo & Marinacci, Massimo, 2002. "Ambiguity Made Precise: A Comparative Foundation," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 102(2), pages 251-289, February.
    10. Faruk Gul & Wolfgang Pesendorfer, 2001. "Temptation and Self-Control," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 69(6), pages 1403-1435, November.
    11. David S. Ahn, 2008. "Ambiguity Without a State Space," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 75(1), pages 3-28.
    12. Antony Millner & Simon Dietz & Geoffrey Heal, 2013. "Scientific Ambiguity and Climate Policy," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 55(1), pages 21-46, May.
    13. Daniel Ellsberg, 1961. "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 75(4), pages 643-669.
    14. Wojciech Olszewski, 2007. "Preferences Over Sets of Lotteries -super-1," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 74(2), pages 567-595.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Anwesha Banerjee & Nicolas Gravel, 2020. "Contribution to a public good under subjective uncertainty," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 22(3), pages 473-500, June.
    2. Sharma, Tridib & Vadovic, Radovan, 2010. "Axiom of Monotonicity: An Experimental Test," MPRA Paper 22863, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    3. Alekseev, Aleksandr & Sokolov, Mikhail V., 2021. "How to measure the average rate of change?," Mathematical Social Sciences, Elsevier, vol. 113(C), pages 43-59.
    4. Panagiotis Christias & Ioannis N. Daliakopoulos & Thrassyvoulos Manios & Mariana Mocanu, 2020. "Comparison of Three Computational Approaches for Tree Crop Irrigation Decision Support," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(5), pages 1-26, May.
    5. Szwagrzak, Karol, 2021. "Weighing Sample Evidence," Working Papers 3-2021, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics.
    6. Paolo Brunori & Alain Trannoy & Caterina Francesca Guidi, 2021. "Ranking populations in terms of inequality of health opportunity: A flexible latent type approach," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 30(2), pages 358-383, February.
    7. Flores-Szwagrzak, Karol, 2022. "Learning by Convex Combination," Working Papers 16-2022, Copenhagen Business School, Department of Economics.
    8. Amélie Vrijdags, 2013. "Min- and Max-induced rankings: an experimental study," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 75(2), pages 233-266, August.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Karni, Edi & Maccheroni, Fabio & Marinacci, Massimo, 2015. "Ambiguity and Nonexpected Utility," Handbook of Game Theory with Economic Applications,, Elsevier.
    2. Jewitt, Ian & Mukerji, Sujoy, 2017. "Ordering ambiguous acts," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 171(C), pages 213-267.
    3. Nehring, Klaus, 2009. "Imprecise probabilistic beliefs as a context for decision-making under ambiguity," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(3), pages 1054-1091, May.
    4. Brian Hill, 2009. "Confidence and ambiguity," Working Papers hal-00489870, HAL.
    5. David Ahn & Syngjoo Choi & Douglas Gale & Shachar Kariv, 2014. "Estimating ambiguity aversion in a portfolio choice experiment," Quantitative Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 5, pages 195-223, July.
    6. Nicolas Gravel & Thierry Marchant, 2022. "Rank Dependent Weighted Average Utility Models for Decision Making under Ignorance or Objective Ambiguity," Working Papers hal-03817362, HAL.
    7. Izhakian, Yehuda, 2020. "A theoretical foundation of ambiguity measurement," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 187(C).
    8. Evren, Özgür, 2019. "Recursive non-expected utility: Connecting ambiguity attitudes to risk preferences and the level of ambiguity," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 114(C), pages 285-307.
    9. Hill, Brian, 2023. "Beyond uncertainty aversion," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 196-222.
    10. Peter Klibanoff & Sujoy Mukerji & Kyoungwon Seo, 2014. "Perceived Ambiguity and Relevant Measures," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 82(5), pages 1945-1978, September.
    11. Stergios Athanassoglou & Valentina Bosetti, 2015. "Setting Environmental Policy When Experts Disagree," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 61(4), pages 497-516, August.
    12. Pavlo Blavatskyy, 2021. "A measure of ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty)," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 91(2), pages 153-171, September.
    13. Daniel Krähmer & Rebecca Stone, 2013. "Anticipated regret as an explanation of uncertainty aversion," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 52(2), pages 709-728, March.
    14. Robert F. Nau, 2006. "Uncertainty Aversion with Second-Order Utilities and Probabilities," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 52(1), pages 136-145, January.
    15. Christoph Bühren & Fabian Meier & Marco Pleßner, 2023. "Ambiguity aversion: bibliometric analysis and literature review of the last 60 years," Management Review Quarterly, Springer, vol. 73(2), pages 495-525, June.
    16. Masahide Watanabe & Toshio Fujimi, 2015. "Evaluating Change in Objective Ambiguous Mortality Probability: Valuing Reduction in Ambiguity Size and Risk Level," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 60(1), pages 1-15, January.
    17. Yehuda Izhakian & Zur Izhakian, 2015. "Decision making in phantom spaces," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 58(1), pages 59-98, January.
    18. Ergin, Haluk & Gul, Faruk, 2009. "A theory of subjective compound lotteries," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 144(3), pages 899-929, May.
    19. Jingyi Xue, 2020. "Preferences with changing ambiguity aversion," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 69(1), pages 1-60, February.
    20. Blavatskyy, Pavlo R., 2013. "Two examples of ambiguity aversion," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 118(1), pages 206-208.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Ignorance; Ambiguity; Conditional probabilities; Expected utility; Ranking sets; Axioms;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
    • D81 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:mateco:v:78:y:2018:i:c:p:79-95. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/jmateco .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.