The Paradox of Minimax Regret

Nathaniel Beck

American Political Science Review, 1975, vol. 69, issue 3, 918-918

Abstract: The introduction of decision making under uncertainty by Ferejohn and Fiorina is an interesting addition to the literature on rational theories of citizen participation. Decision making under uncertainty assumes, however, that the actor has no knowledge of the probabilities of the various outcomes; this is obviously no more true than the assumption of perfect information about these probabilities made in the decision making under risk model. Voters have some, but not perfect, information about the probabilities of at least some of the different possible outcomes. Specifically, let us look at the two-party case. In Ferejohn's notation, (p 3 + p 4) is the probability of an individual's vote making a difference. We might expect a rational citizen to know that this probability is at most minuscule, even if he cannot calculate its exact value.

Date: 1975
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (15)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

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:cup:apsrev:v:69:y:1975:i:03:p:918-918_24

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().