This article reconsiders the Harsanyi–Sen debate concerning whether Harsanyi is justified in interpreting his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems as providing axiomatizations of utilitarianism. Sen’s criticism and its formalization by Weymark are based on the claim that von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theory is ordinal, whereas Harsanyi’s utilitarian conclusions require cardinal utility...

We study a two period representative agent economy in which economic liberalization is modeled as adding a positive random variable to the marginal product of capital. We show liberalization always raises the expected utility of agents. Agents may respond to this by increasing consumption in the ̄rst period. Consequently, consumption in the second period is sometimes smaller than the in the ̄rs...

Based on a cognitive notion of neo-additive capacities reflecting likelihood insensitivity with respect to survival chances, we construct a Choquet Bayesian learning model over the life-cycle that generates a motivational notion of neoadditive survival beliefs expressing ambiguity attitudes. We embed these neoadditive survival beliefs as decision weights in a Choquet expected utility life-cycle...

This paper proves that, in a general financial model with incomplete markets, the multiplicity of certainty equilibria is not necessary for the existence of sunspot effects. These effects are present, by definition, when real economic variables differ across realizations of extrinsic uncertainty. In a financial model of incomplete markets with identical payouts across realizations of extrinsic ...

The paper re-expresses arguments against the normative validity of expected utility theory in Pope (1983, 1991a, 1991b, 1985, 1995, 2000, 2001, 2005, 2006, 2007). These concern the neglect of the evolving stages of knowledge ahead (stages of what the future will bring). Such evolution is fundamental to an experience of risk, yet not consistently incorporated even in axiomatised temporal version...

T paper reports results from a repeated experiment on decision making under risk where subjects must address the same choice problems in several rounds. We investigate how behavior changes in the course of the experiment. The design focuses on choice problems allowing for direct tests of independence and coalescing. We show that inconsistencies in responses as well as violations of independence...

The nonexistence of equilibria in models of electoral competition involving multiple issues is one of the more puzzling results in political economics. In this paper, we relax the standard assumption that parties act as expected utility maximizers. We show that equilibria often exist when parties with limited knowledge about the electorate are modeled as uncertainty-averse. What is more, these ...

We introduce a framework which is based on probabilistic Description logics (Prob-DL), to represent and solve multi-criteria discrete alternative problems by calculating expected utility. To our knowledge, this is the first ever approach for calculating expected utility using a Description logics based formalism.

Representational issues of preferences in the framework of a possibilistic ordinal decision model under uncertainty were introduced by Dubois and Prade quite recently In this framework nite linear uncertainty and preference scales are assumed and decisions can be ranked according to their expected utility in terms of Sugeno integrals In this paper we generalise the model by allowing i to measur...