Revealed Unawareness

Burkhard Schipper

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

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.

Keywords: Unawareness; awareness; unforeseen contingencies; null; zero probability; subjective expected utility; Anscombe-Aumann; small worlds; extensionality of acts; event exchangeability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C70 C72 D03 D80 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-03-18
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic and nep-upt
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Related works:
Working Paper: Revealed Unawareness (2010)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:21491

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