Contingent preference for flexibility: Eliciting beliefs from behavior
Following Kreps (1979), I consider a decision maker who is uncertain about her future taste. This uncertainty leaves the decision maker with a preference for flexibility: When choosing among menus that contain alternatives for future choice, she weakly prefers menus with additional alternatives. Standard representations that accommodate this choice pattern cannot distinguish tastes (indexed by a subjective state space) and beliefs (a probability measure over the subjective states) as different concepts. I allow choice between menus to depend on objective states. My axioms provide a representation that uniquely identifies beliefs, provided objective states are sufficiently relevant for choice. I suggest that this result can provide choice theoretic substance to the assumption, commonly made in the (incomplete) contracting literature, that contracting parties who know each others' ranking of contracts also share beliefs about each others' future tastes in the face of unforeseen contingencies. © 2013 Philipp Sadowski.
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- Economic Theory
- 3803 Economic theory
- 3801 Applied economics
- 1401 Economic Theory
Citation
Published In
DOI
EISSN
ISSN
Publication Date
Volume
Issue
Start / End Page
Related Subject Headings
- Economic Theory
- 3803 Economic theory
- 3801 Applied economics
- 1401 Economic Theory