The impossibility of compromise: some uniqueness properties of expected utility preferences

Paolo Ghirardato and Massimo Marinacci

Economic Theory, 2000, vol. 16, issue 2, 245-258

Abstract: We focus on the following uniqueness property of expected utility preferences: Agreement of two preferences on one interior indifference class implies their equality. We show that, besides expected utility preferences under (objective) risk, this uniqueness property holds for subjective expected utility preferences in Anscombe-Aumann's (partially subjective) and Savage's (fully subjective) settings, while it does not hold for subjective expected utility preferences in settings without rich state spaces. Indeed, when it holds the uniqueness property is even stronger than described above, as it needs only agreement on binary acts. The extension of the uniqueness property to the subjective case is possible because beliefs in the mentioned settings are shown to satisfy an analogous property: If two decision makers agree on a likelihood indifference class, they must have identical beliefs.

Keywords: Subjective expected utility; Uniqueness; Range convexity. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2000-07-14
Note: Received: November 15, 1999; revised version: December 29, 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.de/link/service/journals/00199/papers/0016002/00160245.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted

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:spr:joecth:v:16:y:2000:i:2:p:245-258

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().