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Risk, Ambigity and the Separation of Utility and Beliefs
Paper Number: 1085
Date: 03/01/2000
Abstract:
We introduce and characterize axiomatically a general model of static choice under uncertainty, which is possibly the weakest model in which a separation of cardinal utility and a representation of beliefs is achieved. Most of the popular non-expected utility models in the literature are special cases of it. To prove its usefulness, we show that the model can be used to generalize several well known results on the characterization of risk aversion. Elsewhere [15] we have shown that it can be fruitfully applied to the problem of characterizing a notion of ambiguity aversion, as the separation of utility and beliefs that we achieve can be used to identify and remove aspects of risk attitude from the decision maker's behavior.
Paper Length: 44 pages
Paper: wp1085.pdf