IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mse/cesdoc/20015rr.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Decision Under Normative Uncertainty

Author

Abstract

While ordinary decision theory focuses on empirical uncertainty, real decision-makers also normative uncertainty: uncertainty about value itself. Normative uncertainty is comparable to (Harsanyian or Rawlsian) uncertainty in the 'original position', where one's values are unknown. A comprehensive decisiion theory must address twofold uncertainty - normative and empirical. We present a simple model of twofold uncertainty, and show that the most popular decision principle - maximising expected value ('Expectationalism') - has rival formulations, namely Ex-Ante Expectationalism, Ex-Post Expectationalism, and hybrid theories. These rival theories recommend different decisions, reasoning modes, and attitudes to risk. But they converge under an interesting (necessary and sufficient) condition

Suggested Citation

  • Franz Dietrich & Brian Jabarian, 2020. "Decision Under Normative Uncertainty," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 20015rr, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, revised Jun 2021.
    • Handle: RePEc:mse:cesdoc:20015rr
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Keywords

    normative versus empirical uncertainty; expected value theory; expectationalism; ex-ante versus ex-post approach;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

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

    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:mse:cesdoc:20015rr. 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: Lucie Label (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cenp1fr.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.