Aggregate then evaluate

Zachary Van Oosten and Ruodu Wang

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We distinguish two frameworks for decisions under ambiguity: evaluate-then-aggregate (ETA) and aggregate-then-evaluate (ATE). Given a statistic that represents the decision maker's pure-risk preferences (such as expected utility) and an ambiguous act, an ETA model first evaluates the act under each plausible probabilistic model using this statistic and then aggregates the resulting evaluations according to ambiguity attitudes. In contrast, an ATE model first aggregates ambiguity by assigning the act a single representative distribution and then evaluates that distribution using the statistic. These frameworks differ in the order in which risk and ambiguity are processed, and they coincide when there is no ambiguity. While most existing ambiguity models fall within the ETA framework, our study focuses on the ATE framework, which is conceptually just as compelling and has been relatively neglected in the literature. We develop a Choquet ATE model, which generalizes the Choquet expected utility model by allowing arbitrary pure-risk preferences. We provide an axiomatization of this model in a Savage setting with an exogenous source of unambiguous events. The Choquet ATE framework allows us to analyze a wide range of ambiguity attitudes and their interplay with risk attitudes.

Date: 2025-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.03396 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:arx:papers:2512.03396

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().