Conditional Expected Utility Criteria for Decision Making under Ignorance or Objective Ambiguity

Nicolas Gravel (1) , Thierry Marchant (2) , Arunava Sen (3)

1 GREQAM - Groupement de Recherche en Économie Quantitative d'Aix-Marseille
2 Department of Data Analysis
3 Indian Statistical Institute [New Delhi]

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 finite set of possible probability distributions over a finite set of prices. Every criterion in the family compares sets on the basis of their conditional expected utility, for some probability function taking strictly positive values and some utility function both having the universe of alternatives as their domain.

Mots clés: ignorance; ambiguity; conditional probabilities; expected utility; ranking sets; axioms

Domaines: Economies et finances

Nicolas Gravel, Thierry Marchant, Arunava Sen. Conditional Expected Utility Criteria for Decision Making under Ignorance or Objective Ambiguity. 2016. ⟨halshs-01303548⟩