Indecisiveness aversion and preference for commitment

Eric Danan, Ani Guerdjikovaz () and Alexander Zimper
Additional contact information
Ani Guerdjikovaz: Cornell University, Department of Economics, Uris Hall 462, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA

No 2009-04, THEMA Working Papers from THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise

Abstract: We present a system of behavioral axioms for preferences over menus that is motivated by three assumptions. First, the decision maker is uncertain ex ante (i.e. at the time of choosing a menu) about her ex post (i.e. at the time of choosing an option within her chosen menu) preferences over options, and she anticipates that this subjective uncertainty will only resolve after the ex post stage. Second, she is averse to ex post indecisiveness (i.e. to having to choose between options that she cannot rank with certainty). Third, when evaluating a menu she discards options that are dominated (i.e. inferior to another option whatever her ex post preferences may be) and restricts attention to the undominated ones. Under these assumptions, the decision maker has a preference for commitment in the sense of preferring menus with fewer undominated alternatives. We derive a representation in which the decision maker's uncertainty about her ex post preferences is captured by means of a subjective state space, which in turn determines which options are undominated in a given menu, and in which the decision maker fears, whenever indecisive, to choose an option that will turn out to be the worst (undominated) one according to the realization of her ex post preferences.

Keywords: Opportunity sets; subjective uncertainty; indecisiveness; dominance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://thema.u-cergy.fr/IMG/documents/2009-04.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Indecisiveness aversion and preference for commitment (2012)
Working Paper: Indecisiveness aversion and preference for commitment (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ema:worpap:2009-04

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in THEMA Working Papers from THEMA (THéorie Economique, Modélisation et Applications), Université de Cergy-Pontoise Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Stefania Marcassa ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).