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Unawareness without AU Introspection

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  • Fukuda, Satoshi

Abstract

This paper studies unawareness in terms of the lack of knowledge in a model that generalizes both a non-partitional standard-state-space model and a stationary generalized-state-space model. The resulting model may not necessarily satisfy AU Introspection: an agent, who is unaware of an event, is unaware of being unaware of it. Yet, the paper shows that such agent does not know whether she is unaware of it, i.e., she is ignorant of being unaware of it. First, the paper asks when and how the generalized model (in particular, a standard-state-space model) has a non-trivial form of unawareness and sensible properties of unawareness. Second, the paper studies the implications of the violation of AU Introspection. An agent, when facing infinitely many objects of knowledge, may know that there is an event of which she is unaware. Treating new information only at face value can cause an agent to become unaware of some event.

Suggested Citation

  • Fukuda, Satoshi, 2021. "Unawareness without AU Introspection," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 94(C).
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:mateco:v:94:y:2021:i:c:s0304406820301336
    DOI: 10.1016/j.jmateco.2020.102456
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    Cited by:

    1. Alex A. T. Rathke, 2023. "On the state-space model of unawareness," Papers 2304.04626, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2023.

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