Belief revision generalized: a joint characterization of Bayes's and Jeffrey's rules

Franz Dietrich, Christian List and Richard Bradley

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We present a general framework for representing belief-revision rules and use it to characterize Bayes's rule as a classical example and Jeffrey's rule as a non-classical one. In Jeffrey's rule, the input to a belief revision is not simply the information that some event has occurred, as in Bayes's rule, but a new assignment of probabilities to some events. Despite their differences, Bayes's and Jeffrey's rules can be characterized in terms of the same axioms: responsiveness, which requires that revised beliefs incorporate what has been learnt, and conservativeness, which requires that beliefs on which the learnt input is ‘silent’ do not change. To illustrate the use of non-Bayesian belief revision in economic theory, we sketch a simple decision-theoretic application.

Keywords: Belief revision; subjective probability; Bayes's rule; Jeffrey's rule; axiomatic foundations; fine-grained versus coarse-grained beliefs; unawareness (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C73 D01 D80 D81 D83 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-12-02
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-mic
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Published in Journal of Economic Theory, 2, December, 2015, 162, pp. 352-371. ISSN: 0022-0531

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Related works:
Journal Article: Belief revision generalized: A joint characterization of Bayes' and Jeffrey's rules (2016)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:64836

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