Econometrica Vol. 62 No. 3 1994
A General Result for Quantifying Beliefs
Abstract
This paper presents conditions under which a person's beliefs about the occurrence of uncertain events are quantified by a capacity measure, i.e., a nonadditive probability. Additivity of probability is violated in a large number of applications where probabilities are vague or ambiguous due to lack of information.The key feature of the theory presented in this paper is a separation of the derivation of capacities for events from a specific choice model. This is akin to eliciting a probability distribution for a random variable without committing to a specific decision model. Conditions are given under which Choquet expected utility, the Machina-Schmeidler probabilistically sophisticated model, and subjective expected utility can be derived as special cases of our general model.
- DOI
- 10.2307/2951663
- Volume
- 62
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 683
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex