期刊名称：Discussion Paper Series / Department of Economics, New York University
出版年度：2005
卷号：1
出版社：New York University
摘要：I show that virtually any model of decision making under uncertainty
is associated to a certain structure. This contains three fundamental ingredients:
(1) The domain of the acts; (2) Another set, which is called
the set of models for the decision maker; and (3) The decision maker’s
information about the set of models (an algebra of subsets of the set of
models). A consequence of this finding is that that the decision maker’s
choices can be viewed as the outcome of a two-stage process. First, the
set of acts is mapped into a system of hypothetical bets on the set of
models. Then, the latter are ranked by the decision maker. I show that
this procedure can be thought of as describing a general form of analogical
reasoning. I also observe that the appearance of two different sets implies
that the decision maker is uncertain about two different objects and that
he may receive information about any of them. In particular, information
about the set of models affects the decision maker’s ranking of the
available alternatives. In the sequel to this paper, I show that certain
natural information structures lead to an inherent inability of assigning
probabilities on the domain of the acts. In a formal sense, their properties
describe the idea of Knightian Uncertainty.
Loading...
