COARSE CONTINGENCIES

The paper considers an agent who must choose an action today under uncertainty about the consequence of any chosen action but without having in mind a complete list of all the contingencies that could in‡uence outcomes. She conceives of some relevant (subjective) contingencies but she is aware that these contingencies are coarse they leave out some details that may a¤ect outcomes. Though she may not be able to describe these …ner details, she is aware that they exist and this may a¤ect her behavior. Epstein and Seo are at Department of Economics, University of Rochester, Rochester, NY 14627, lepn@troi.cc.rochester.edu, kseo@troi.cc.rochester.edu. Marinacci is at Dipartimento di Statistica e Matematica Applicata and Collegio Carlo Alberto, Università di Torino, Italy, massimo.marinacci@unito.it. Epstein gratefully acknowledges the …nancial support of the NSF (award SES-0611456) and Marinacci that of the Ministero dell’Istruzione, dell’Università e della Ricerca. We are grateful also to two referees, seminar audiences at Chicago and Olin, Fabio Maccheroni, Luigi Montrucchio, and especially Bart Lipman and Todd Sarver for helpful comments and discussions. This supersedes a paper with the same title by Epstein and Marinacci; the main innovation here is to provide foundations for our second model see Section 4, particularly Theorem 4.1.

[1]  Eddie Dekel,et al.  A Unique Subjective State Space for Unforeseen Contingencies , 1997 .

[2]  Mark J. Machina,et al.  Temporal risk and the nature of induced preferences , 1984 .

[3]  J. Milnor,et al.  AN AXIOMATIC APPROACH TO MEASURABLE UTILITY , 1953 .

[4]  Paolo Ghirardato,et al.  Coping with ignorance: unforeseen contingencies and non-additive uncertainty , 2001 .

[5]  A. Rustichini,et al.  Ambiguity Aversion, Robustness, and the Variational Representation of Preferences , 2006 .

[6]  A. Rustichini,et al.  Ambiguity Aversion, Malevolent Nature, and the Variational Representation of Preferences , 2004 .

[7]  David M. Kreps Static choice in the presence of unforeseen contingencies , 1992 .

[8]  Sujoy Mukerji Ambiguity aversion and incompleteness of contractual form , 1998 .

[9]  Martin Schneider,et al.  Recursive multiple-priors , 2003, J. Econ. Theory.

[10]  A. C. M. van Rooij,et al.  Introduction to Riesz spaces , 1977 .

[11]  Massimo Marinacci,et al.  Introduction to the mathematics of ambiguity , 2004 .

[12]  Barton L. Lipman,et al.  REPRESENTING PREFERENCES WITH A UNIQUE SUBJECTIVE STATE SPACE , 2001 .

[13]  D. Schmeidler Subjective Probability and Expected Utility without Additivity , 1989 .

[14]  Glenn Shafer,et al.  A Mathematical Theory of Evidence , 2020, A Mathematical Theory of Evidence.

[15]  R. Phelps Convex Functions, Monotone Operators and Differentiability , 1989 .

[16]  L. Hörmander Sur la fonction d’appui des ensembles convexes dans un espace localement convexe , 1955 .

[17]  David M. Kreps A REPRESENTATION THEOREM FOR "PREFERENCE FOR FLEXIBILITY" , 1979 .

[18]  K. Nehring Preference for Flexibility and Freedom of Choice in a Savage Framework , 2003 .

[19]  G. Shafer Savage revisited , 1990 .

[20]  E. Beckenbach CONVEX FUNCTIONS , 2007 .

[21]  G. Choquet Theory of capacities , 1954 .

[22]  P. Malliavin Infinite dimensional analysis , 1993 .

[23]  Klaus Nehring,et al.  Preference for Flexibility in a Savage Framework , 1999 .

[24]  Harvey J. Greenberg,et al.  A Review of Quasi-Convex Functions , 1971, Oper. Res..

[25]  Sujoy Mukerji,et al.  Understanding the nonadditive probability decision model , 1997 .

[26]  I. Gilboa,et al.  Maxmin Expected Utility with Non-Unique Prior , 1989 .

[27]  Eric Maskin,et al.  Unforeseen Contingencies and Incomplete Contracts , 1999 .