Object-Based Unawareness

Kim-Sau Chung and Oliver Board ()

No 2007-2, Working Papers from University of Minnesota, Department of Economics

Abstract: The goal of this paper is to construct a user-friendly model of unawareness. We start from an axiom system (in first-order modal logic) that enables us to express the following kinds of sentences: “the agent is not sure whether or not there is anything that he is unaware of”, and “I am not sure whether or not you are aware of something that I am not”. We then prove a characterization theorem which describes a class of structures, called object-based unawareness structures, that correspond to this axiom system. As an application, we explain how an object-based unawareness structure can be use to model those American founding fathers who were opposed to the inclusion of the Bill of Rights in the constitution.

Keywords: unawareness; object-based; modal logic; bill of rights (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 D80 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2007-08-24, Revised 2007-08-24
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (49)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:min:wpaper:2007-2

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