Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0
Author-Name: Burkhard Schipper
Author-Name-First: Burkhard
Author-Name-Last: Schipper
Author-Workplace-Name: Department of Economics, University of California Davis
Title: Revealed Unawareness
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.
Length: 29
File-URL: https://repec.dss.ucdavis.edu/files/HXFxfV81XwuZNmHqcQimPiX5/10-5.pdf
File-Format: application/pdf
Number: 303
Classification-JEL: C70, C72, D80, D81
KeyWords: Unawareness, awareness, unforeseen contingencies, null, zero probability, subjective expected utility, Anscombe-Aumann, small worlds, extensionality of acts, event exchangeability
Creation-Date: 20100317
Handle: RePEc:cda:wpaper:303