Ordinal One-Switch Utility Functions

Ali E. Abbas () and David E. Bell ()
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Ali E. Abbas: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California 90089
David E. Bell: Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts 02163

Operations Research, 2015, vol. 63, issue 6, 1411-1419

Abstract: We study the problem of finding ordinal utility functions to rank the outcomes of a decision when preference independence between the attributes is not present. We propose that the next level of complexity is to assume that preferences over one attribute can switch at most once as another attribute varies from low to high. We refer to this property as ordinal one-switch independence. We present both necessary and sufficient conditions for this ordinal property to hold and provide families of functions that satisfy this new property.

Keywords: utility theory; dependence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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