Revealed Unawareness

Schipper, Burkhard C (2010): Revealed Unawareness.

Abstract

I develop awareness-dependent subjective expected utility by taking unawareness structures introduced in Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper (2006, 2008, 2009) as primitives in the Anscombe-Aumann approach to subjective expected utility. I observe that a decision maker is unaware of an event if and only if her choices reveal that the event is "null" and the negation of the event is "null". Moreover, I characterize "impersonal" expected utility that is behaviorally indistinguishable from awareness-dependent subject expected utility and assigns probability zero to some subsets of states that are not necessarily events. I discuss in what sense impersonal expected utility can not represent unawareness.

• Item Type: MPRA Paper
• Language: English
• Keywords: Unawareness; awareness; unforeseen contingencies; null; zero probability; subjective expected utility; Anscombe-Aumann; small worlds; extensionality of acts; event exchangeability
• Subjects: D - Microeconomics > D0 - General > D03 - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles; D - Microeconomics > D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty > D81 - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C7 - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory > C70 - General; D - Microeconomics > D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty > D80 - General; C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C7 - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory > C72 - Noncooperative Games

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