Revealed Unawareness

Burkhard Schipper

No 303, Working Papers from University of California, Davis, Department of Economics

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 D80 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 29
Date: 2010-03-17
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.dss.ucdavis.edu/files/HXFxfV81XwuZNmHqcQimPiX5/10-5.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Revealed Unawareness (2010)
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:cda:wpaper:303

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from University of California, Davis, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Letters and Science IT Services Unit ().