An Axiomatic Approach to Decision under Knightian Uncertainty
Activity: Talk or presentation › Conference Presentations › Research
John-Oliver Engler - Speaker
Stefan Baumgärtner - Speaker
Based on a set of seven axioms, we develop an original approach to utility
under Knightian uncertainty that circumvents numerous conceptual problems
of existing approaches in the literature. We understand and conceptualize
Knightian uncertainty as income lotteries with known payos in each outcome,
but unknown probabilities. This distinguishes our approach from the
ambiguity approach where decision makers are assumed to have some sort of
probabilistic belief about outcomes. We provide a proof that there exists a
function H from the set of Knightian lotteries to the real numbers such that
lottery f is preferred to lottery g if and only if H(f) > H(g) and that H is
unique up to cardinal transformations. We propose and illustrate one possible
concrete function satisfying our axioms with a static sample decision problem
and compare it to other decision rules such as maximin, maximax, the Hurwicz
criterion, the minimum regret rule and the principle of insucient reason. We
nd that the overall ranking of the lotteries is dierent from these well-known
criteria, but the most preferred option is the same as with the maximin rule
and a pessimistic Hurwicz individual.
15.02.2013
Event
28th Annual Congress of the European Economic Association and 67th European Meeting of the Econometric Society - EEA 2013
26.08.13 → 30.08.13
Gothenburg, SwedenEvent: Conference
- Sustainability Science - Sustainability Economics