IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1105.1814.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

A Contextual Risk Model for the Ellsberg Paradox

Author

Listed:
  • Diederik Aerts
  • Sandro Sozzo

Abstract

The Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes show that the expected utility hypothesis and Savage's Sure-Thing Principle are violated in real life decisions. The popular explanation in terms of 'ambiguity aversion' is not completely accepted. On the other hand, we have recently introduced a notion of 'contextual risk' to mathematically capture what is known as 'ambiguity' in the economics literature. Situations in which contextual risk occurs cannot be modeled by Kolmogorovian classical probabilistic structures, but a non-Kolmogorovian framework with a quantum-like structure is needed. We prove in this paper that the contextual risk approach can be applied to the Ellsberg paradox, and elaborate a 'sphere model' within our 'hidden measurement formalism' which reveals that it is the overall conceptual landscape that is responsible of the disagreement between actual human decisions and the predictions of expected utility theory, which generates the paradox. This result points to the presence of a 'quantum conceptual layer' in human thought which is superposed to the usually assumed 'classical logical layer'.

Suggested Citation

  • Diederik Aerts & Sandro Sozzo, 2011. "A Contextual Risk Model for the Ellsberg Paradox," Papers 1105.1814, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1105.1814
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1105.1814
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

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


    Cited by:

    1. Thomas Boyer-Kassem & Sébastien Duchêne & Eric Guerci, 2016. "Quantum-like models cannot account for the conjunction fallacy," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 81(4), pages 479-510, November.
    2. Ana Njegovanovic, 2018. "Hilbert Space / Quantum Theory of the Financial Decision and Role of the Prefrontal Cortex with a View to Emotions," International Journal of Social and Administrative Sciences, Asian Economic and Social Society, vol. 3(1), pages 42-54, March.
    3. Ismaël Rafaï & Sébastien Duchêne & Eric Guerci & Irina Basieva & Andrei Khrennikov, 2022. "The triple-store experiment: a first simultaneous test of classical and quantum probabilities in choice over menus," Theory and Decision, Springer, vol. 92(2), pages 387-406, March.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:arx:papers:1105.1814. 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.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using 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: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    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.