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  1. Discounting for public policy: A survey.Hilary Greaves - 2017 - Economics and Philosophy 33 (3):391-439.
    This article is a critical survey of the debate over the value of the social discount rate, with a particular focus on climate change. The ma- jority of the material surveyed is from the economics rather than from the philosophy literature, but the emphasis of the survey itself is on founda- tions in ethical and other normative theory rather than highly technical details. I begin by locating the standard approach to discounting within the overall landscape of ethical theory, and explaining (...)
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  • Ambiguity Attitudes, Framing and Consistency.Alex Voorhoeve, Ken G. Binmore, Arnaldur Stefansson & Lisa Stewart - 2016 - Theory and Decision 81 (3):313-337.
    We use probability-matching variations on Ellsberg’s single-urn experiment to assess three questions: (1) How sensitive are ambiguity attitudes to changes from a gain to a loss frame? (2) How sensitive are ambiguity attitudes to making ambiguity easier to recognize? (3) What is the relation between subjects’ consistency of choice and the ambiguity attitudes their choices display? Contrary to most other studies, we find that a switch from a gain to a loss frame does not lead to a switch from ambiguity (...)
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  • Minimizing regret in dynamic decision problems.Joseph Y. Halpern & Samantha Leung - 2016 - Theory and Decision 81 (1):123-151.
    The menu-dependent nature of regret-minimization creates subtleties when it is applied to dynamic decision problems. It is not clear whether forgone opportunities should be included in the menu. We explain commonly observed behavioral patterns as minimizing regret when forgone opportunities are present. If forgone opportunities are included, we can characterize when a form of dynamic consistency is guaranteed.
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  • Types of Uncertainty.Richard Bradley & Mareile Drechsler - 2013 - Erkenntnis 79 (6):1225-1248.
    We distinguish three qualitatively different types of uncertainty—ethical, option and state space uncertainty—that are distinct from state uncertainty, the empirical uncertainty that is typically measured by a probability function on states of the world. Ethical uncertainty arises if the agent cannot assign precise utilities to consequences. Option uncertainty arises when the agent does not know what precise consequence an act has at every state. Finally, state space uncertainty exists when the agent is unsure how to construct an exhaustive state space. (...)
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  • Two out of three ain't bad: A comment on “the ambiguity aversion literature: A critical assessment”.Marciano Siniscalchi - 2009 - Economics and Philosophy 25 (3):335-356.
    Al-Najjar and Weinstein propose to scrutinize the implications of recent theories of ambiguity in dynamic settings. They conclude that such implications are so unreasonable as to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the theories under consideration. The present paper argues that the seemingly unreasonable implications highlighted by Al-Najjar and Weinstein can be understood as the result of basic trade-offs that arise naturally in the presence of ambiguity. In particular, Al-Najjar and Weinstein are uncomfortable with the possibility that an ambiguity-averse individual (...)
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  • Coping rationally with ambiguity: Robustness versus ambiguity-aversion.Klaus Nehring - 2009 - Economics and Philosophy 25 (3):303-334.
    Al-Najjar and Weinstein argue that the extant literature on ambiguity aversion is not successful in accounting for Ellsberg choices as rational responses to ambiguity. We concur, and propose that rational choice under ambiguity aims at robustness rather than avoidance of ambiguity. A central argument explains why robust choice is intrinsically context-dependent and legitimately violates standard choice consistency conditions. If choice consistency is forced, however, ambiguity-aversion emerges as a semi-rational response to ambiguity.
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  • (1 other version)Maximal cluelessness.Andreas Mogensen - manuscript
    I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance and inscrutability of the indirect effects of our actions, conjoined with the plausibility of a permissive decision principle governing cases of deep uncertainty, known as the maximality rule. I conclude that (...)
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  • Rational Aversion to Information.Sven Neth - forthcoming - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Is more information always better? Or are there some situations in which more information can make us worse off? Good (1967) argues that expected utility maximizers should always accept more information if the information is cost-free and relevant. But Good's argument presupposes that you are certain you will update by conditionalization. If we relax this assumption and allow agents to be uncertain about updating, these agents can be rationally required to reject free and relevant information. Since there are good reasons (...)
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  • Learning by Ignoring the Most Wrong.Seamus Bradley - 2022 - Kriterion – Journal of Philosophy 36 (1):9-31.
    Imprecise probabilities are an increasingly popular way of reasoning about rational credence. However they are subject to an apparent failure to display convincing inductive learning. This paper demonstrates that a small modification to the update rule for IP allows us to overcome this problem, albeit at the cost of satisfying only a weaker concept of coherence.
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  • The key to the knowledge norm of action is ambiguity.Patricia Rich - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):9669-9698.
    Knowledge-first epistemology includes a knowledge norm of action: roughly, act only on what you know. This norm has been criticized, especially from the perspective of so-called standard decision theory. Mueller and Ross provide example decision problems which seem to show that acting properly cannot require knowledge. I argue that this conclusion depends on applying a particular decision theory which is ill-motivated in this context. Agents’ knowledge is often most plausibly formalized as an ambiguous epistemic state, and the theory of decision (...)
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  • Impartial Evaluation under Ambiguity.Richard Bradley - 2022 - Ethics 132 (3):541-569.
    How should an impartial social observer judge distributions of well-being across different individuals when there is uncertainty regarding the state of the world? I explore this question by imposing very weak conditions of rationality and benevolent sympathy on impartial betterness judgments under uncertainty. Although weak enough to be consistent with all the main theories of rationality, these conditions prove to be sufficient to rule out any heterogeneity in what is good for individuals, to require a neutral attitude to uncertainty on (...)
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  • Ambiguity and price competition.R. R. Routledge & R. A. Edwards - 2020 - Theory and Decision 88 (2):231-256.
    There are few models of price competition in a homogeneous-good market which permit general asymmetries of information amongst the sellers. This work studies a price game with discontinuous payoffs in which both costs and market demand are ex ante uncertain. The sellers evaluate uncertain profits with maximin expected utilities exhibiting ambiguity aversion. The buyers in the market are permitted to split between sellers tieing at the minimum price in arbitrary ways which may be deterministic or random. The role of the (...)
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  • Ambiguity Aversion behind the Veil of Ignorance.H. Orri Stefánsson - 2021 - Synthese 198 (7):6159-6182.
    The veil of ignorance argument was used by John C. Harsanyi to defend Utilitarianism and by John Rawls to defend the absolute priority of the worst off. In a recent paper, Lara Buchak revives the veil of ignorance argument, and uses it to defend an intermediate position between Harsanyi's and Rawls' that she calls Relative Prioritarianism. None of these authors explore the implications of allowing that agent's behind the veil are averse to ambiguity. Allowing for aversion to ambiguity---which is both (...)
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  • (1 other version)Imprecise Probabilities.Seamus Bradley - 2019 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • A Counterexample to Three Imprecise Decision Theories.Seamus Bradley - 2018 - Theoria 85 (1):18-30.
    There is currently much discussion about how decision making should proceed when an agent's degrees of belief are imprecise; represented by a set of probability functions. I show that decision rules recently discussed by Sarah Moss, Susanna Rinard and Rohan Sud all suffer from the same defect: they all struggle to rationalize diachronic ambiguity aversion. Since ambiguity aversion is among the motivations for imprecise credence, this suggests that the search for an adequate imprecise decision rule is not yet over.
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  • Ambiguity aversion under maximum-likelihood updating.Daniel Heyen - 2018 - Theory and Decision 84 (3):373-386.
    Maximum-likelihood updating is a well-known approach for extending static ambiguity sensitive preferences to dynamic set-ups. This paper develops an example in which MLU induces an ambiguity averse maxmin expected utility decision-maker to prefer a bet on an ambiguous over a risky urn and be more willing to bet on the ambiguous urn compared to an subjective expected utility decision-maker. This is challenging, since prior to observing draws from the urns, the MEU decision-maker actually preferred the risky over the ambiguous bet (...)
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  • Can free evidence be bad? Value of informationfor the imprecise probabilist.Seamus Bradley & Katie Steele - 2016 - Philosophy of Science 83 (1):1-28.
    This paper considers a puzzling conflict between two positions that are each compelling: it is irrational for an agent to pay to avoid `free' evidence before making a decision, and rational agents may have imprecise beliefs and/or desires. Indeed, we show that Good's theorem concerning the invariable choice-worthiness of free evidence does not generalise to the imprecise realm, given the plausible existing decision theories for handling imprecision. A key ingredient in the analysis, and a potential source of controversy, is the (...)
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  • Decision Theory.Katie Steele & H. Orri Stefánsson - 2012 - In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • A Defense of Pluralist Egalitarianism under Severe Uncertainty: Axiomatic Characterization.Akira Inoue & Kaname Miyagishima - 2022 - Wiley: Journal of Political Philosophy 30 (3):370-394.
    Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 370-394, September 2022.
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  • The Sequential Dominance Argument for the Independence Axiom of Expected Utility Theory.Johan E. Gustafsson - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 103 (1):21-39.
    Independence is the condition that, if X is preferred to Y, then a lottery between X and Z is preferred to a lottery between Y and Z given the same probability of Z. Is it rationally required that one’s preferences conform to Independence? The main objection to this requirement is that it would rule out the alleged rationality of Allais and Ellsberg Preferences. In this paper, I put forward a sequential dominance argument with fairly weak assumptions for a variant of (...)
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  • On the Individuation of Choice Options.Roberto Fumagalli - 2020 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 50 (4):338-365.
    Decision theorists have attempted to accommodate several violations of decision theory’s axiomatic requirements by modifying how agents’ choice options are individuated and formally represented. In recent years, prominent authors have worried that these modifications threaten to trivialize decision theory, make the theory unfalsifiable, impose overdemanding requirements on decision theorists, and hamper decision theory’s internal coherence. In this paper, I draw on leading descriptive and normative works in contemporary decision theory to address these prominent concerns. In doing so, I articulate and (...)
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  • The Social Cost of Carbon: Valuing Inequality, Risk, and Population for Climate Policy.Marc Fleurbaey, Maddalena Ferranna, Mark Budolfson, Francis Dennig, Kian Mintz-Woo, Robert Socolow, Dean Spears & Stéphane Zuber - 2019 - The Monist 102 (1):84-109.
    We analyze the role of ethical values in the determination of the social cost of carbon, arguing that the familiar debate about discounting is too narrow. Other ethical issues are equally important to computing the social cost of carbon, and we highlight inequality, risk, and population ethics. Although the usual approach, in the economics of cost-benefit analysis for climate policy, is confined to a utilitarian axiology, the methodology of the social cost of carbon is rather flexible and can be expanded (...)
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  • Fast and frugal heuristics: rationality and the limits of naturalism.Horacio Arló-Costa & Arthur Paul Pedersen - 2013 - Synthese 190 (5):831-850.
    Gerd Gigerenzer and Thomas Sturm have recently proposed a modest form of what they describe as a normative, ecological and limited naturalism. The basic move in their argument is to infer that certain heuristics we tend to use should be used in the right ecological setting. To address this argument, we first consider the case of a concrete heuristic called Take the Best (TTB). There are at least two variants of the heuristic which we study by making explicit the choice (...)
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  • More foundations of the decision sciences: introduction.Horacio Arló Costa & Jeffrey Helzner - 2012 - Synthese 187 (1):1-10.
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  • (1 other version)Maximal Cluelessness.Andreas Mogensen - 2021 - Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1):141-162.
    I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance and inscrutability of the indirect effects of our actions, conjoined with the plausibility of a permissive decision principle governing cases of deep uncertainty, known as the maximality rule. I conclude that (...)
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  • Decision theory with prospect interference and entanglement.V. I. Yukalov & D. Sornette - 2011 - Theory and Decision 70 (3):283-328.
    We present a novel variant of decision making based on the mathematical theory of separable Hilbert spaces. This mathematical structure captures the effect of superposition of composite prospects, including many incorporated intentions, which allows us to describe a variety of interesting fallacies and anomalies that have been reported to particularize the decision making of real human beings. The theory characterizes entangled decision making, non-commutativity of subsequent decisions, and intention interference. We demonstrate how the violation of the Savage’s sure-thing principle, known (...)
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  • Representing credal imprecision: from sets of measures to hierarchical Bayesian models.Daniel Lassiter - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (6):1463-1485.
    The basic Bayesian model of credence states, where each individual’s belief state is represented by a single probability measure, has been criticized as psychologically implausible, unable to represent the intuitive distinction between precise and imprecise probabilities, and normatively unjustifiable due to a need to adopt arbitrary, unmotivated priors. These arguments are often used to motivate a model on which imprecise credal states are represented by sets of probability measures. I connect this debate with recent work in Bayesian cognitive science, where (...)
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  • On the Ellsberg and Machina paradoxes.Keiran Sharpe - 2023 - Theory and Decision 95 (4):539-573.
    This paper constructs a simple model of decision-making that accounts for the paradoxes of Ellsberg and Machina. It does so by representing decision makers’ beliefs on the vector space $${\mathbb{R}}\times {\mathbb{R}}$$ R × R and by providing a reasonable decision rule with axiomatic foundations. Moreover, the model allows for a characterization that clearly distinguishes between the two paradoxes. The interesting feature of the paper is that the ‘resolution’ of the paradoxes is along the lines suggested by the eponymous authors themselves. (...)
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  • Foundations of ambiguity and economic modelling.Sujoy Mukerji - 2009 - Economics and Philosophy 25 (3):297-302.
    Are foundations of models of ambiguity-sensitive preferences too flawed to be usefully applied to economic models? Al-Najjar and Weinstein (2009) say such is indeed the case. In this paper, first, we point out that many of the key arguments by Al-Najjar and Weinstein do not apply to quite a few of the ambiguity preference models of more recent vintage, and therefore to that extent do not undermine the foundational aspects or applicability of ambiguity models in general. Second, we argue the (...)
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