IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/ormnsc/v61y2015i1p111-128.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Decision Making Under Uncertainty When Preference Information Is Incomplete

Author

Listed:
  • Benjamin Armbruster

    (Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60208)

  • Erick Delage

    (Department of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal, Montréal, Québec H3T 2A7, Canada)

Abstract

We consider the problem of optimal decision making under uncertainty but assume that the decision maker’s utility function is not completely known. Instead, we consider all the utilities that meet some criteria, such as preferring certain lotteries over other lotteries and being risk averse, S-shaped, or prudent. These criteria extend the ones used in the first- and second-order stochastic dominance framework. We then give tractable formulations for such decision-making problems. We formulate them as robust utility maximization problems, as optimization problems with stochastic dominance constraints, and as robust certainty equivalent maximization problems. We use a portfolio allocation problem to illustrate our results. This paper was accepted by Dimitris Bertsimas, optimization.

Suggested Citation

  • Benjamin Armbruster & Erick Delage, 2015. "Decision Making Under Uncertainty When Preference Information Is Incomplete," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(1), pages 111-128, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:61:y:2015:i:1:p:111-128
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2014.2059
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2059
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2059?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
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Grable, John & Lytton, Ruth H., 1999. "Financial risk tolerance revisited: the development of a risk assessment instrument," Financial Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 8(3), pages 163-181.
    2. Juan Dubra & Fabio Maccheroni & Efe A. Ok, 2004. "Expected Utility Without the Completeness Axiom," Yale School of Management Working Papers ysm404, Yale School of Management.
    3. Meyer, Jack, 1977. "Choice among distributions," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 14(2), pages 326-336, April.
    4. Hayne E. Leland, 1968. "Saving and Uncertainty: The Precautionary Demand for Saving," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 82(3), pages 465-473.
    5. Daniel Kahneman & Amos Tversky, 2013. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision Under Risk," World Scientific Book Chapters, in: Leonard C MacLean & William T Ziemba (ed.), HANDBOOK OF THE FUNDAMENTALS OF FINANCIAL DECISION MAKING Part I, chapter 6, pages 99-127, World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd..
    6. Dubra, Juan & Maccheroni, Fabio & Ok, Efe A., 2004. "Expected utility theory without the completeness axiom," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 115(1), pages 118-133, March.
    7. Louis Eeckhoudt & Harris Schlesinger, 2006. "Putting Risk in Its Proper Place," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(1), pages 280-289, March.
    8. Erick Delage & Yinyu Ye, 2010. "Distributionally Robust Optimization Under Moment Uncertainty with Application to Data-Driven Problems," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 58(3), pages 595-612, June.
    9. Moshe Leshno & Haim Levy, 2002. "Preferred by "All" and Preferred by "Most" Decision Makers: Almost Stochastic Dominance," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 48(8), pages 1074-1085, August.
    10. Dentcheva, Darinka & Ruszczynski, Andrzej, 2006. "Portfolio optimization with stochastic dominance constraints," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 30(2), pages 433-451, February.
    11. Dimitris Bertsimas & Allison O'Hair, 2013. "Learning Preferences Under Noise and Loss Aversion: An Optimization Approach," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 61(5), pages 1190-1199, October.
    12. A. Ben-Tal & A. Nemirovski, 1998. "Robust Convex Optimization," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 23(4), pages 769-805, November.
    13. Aharon Ben‐Tal & Marc Teboulle, 2007. "An Old‐New Concept Of Convex Risk Measures: The Optimized Certainty Equivalent," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 17(3), pages 449-476, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Hildebrandt, Patrick & Knoke, Thomas, 2011. "Investment decisions under uncertainty--A methodological review on forest science studies," Forest Policy and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 1-15, January.
    2. Simone Cerreia-Vioglio & Fabio Maccheroni & Massimo Marinacci, 2017. "Stochastic Dominance Analysis Without the Independence Axiom," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(4), pages 1097-1109, April.
    3. Andrew J. Keith & Darryl K. Ahner, 2021. "A survey of decision making and optimization under uncertainty," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 300(2), pages 319-353, May.
    4. Light, Bar & Perlroth, Andres, 2021. "The Family of Alpha,[a,b] Stochastic Orders: Risk vs. Expected Value," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 96(C).
    5. Simone Cerreia‐Vioglio & David Dillenberger & Pietro Ortoleva, 2015. "Cautious Expected Utility and the Certainty Effect," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 83, pages 693-728, March.
    6. Buturak, Gökhan & Evren, Özgür, 2017. "Choice overload and asymmetric regret," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 12(3), September.
    7. Aharon Ben-Tal & Dimitris Bertsimas & David B. Brown, 2010. "A Soft Robust Model for Optimization Under Ambiguity," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 58(4-part-2), pages 1220-1234, August.
    8. Wang, Fan & Zhang, Chao & Zhang, Hui & Xu, Liang, 2021. "Short-term physician rescheduling model with feature-driven demand for mental disorders outpatients," Omega, Elsevier, vol. 105(C).
    9. Zhi Chen & Melvyn Sim & Peng Xiong, 2020. "Robust Stochastic Optimization Made Easy with RSOME," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 66(8), pages 3329-3339, August.
    10. Arts, Sara & Ong, Qiyan & Qiu, Jianying, 2020. "Measuring subjective decision confidence," MPRA Paper 106811, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    11. Walter Bossert & Kotaro Suzumura, 2015. "Expected utility without full transitivity," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 45(4), pages 707-722, December.
    12. Wolfram Wiesemann & Daniel Kuhn & Melvyn Sim, 2014. "Distributionally Robust Convex Optimization," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 62(6), pages 1358-1376, December.
    13. Simone Cerreia-Vioglio & Efe A. Ok, 2018. "The Rational Core of Preference Relations," Working Papers 632, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.
    14. Eddie Dekel & Barton L. Lipman, 2010. "How (Not) to Do Decision Theory," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 2(1), pages 257-282, September.
    15. Sebastian Ebert & Daniel Wiesen, 2014. "Joint measurement of risk aversion, prudence, and temperance," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 231-252, June.
    16. Donatella Baiardi & Marco Magnani & Mario Menegatti, 2020. "The theory of precautionary saving: an overview of recent developments," Review of Economics of the Household, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 513-542, June.
    17. Babacar Seck & Laetitia Andrieu & Michel De Lara, 2012. "Parametric multi-attribute utility functions for optimal profit under risk constraints," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 72(2), pages 257-271, February.
    18. Elena Cettolin & Arno Riedl, 2015. "Revealed Incomplete Preferences under Uncertainty," CESifo Working Paper Series 5359, CESifo.
    19. A. Paç & Mustafa Pınar, 2014. "Robust portfolio choice with CVaR and VaR under distribution and mean return ambiguity," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 22(3), pages 875-891, October.
    20. Takehito Masuda & Eungik Lee, 2019. "Higher order risk attitudes and prevention under different timings of loss," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 22(1), pages 197-215, March.

    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:inm:ormnsc:v:61:y:2015:i:1:p:111-128. 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: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    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.