Decision making under ambiguity [Elektronische Ressource] / vorgelegt von Adam Dominiak

Informations

• Publié par: ruprecht-karls-universitat_heidelberg
• Publié le: 01 janvier 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 12
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Decision Making under Ambiguity
Dissertation
zur Erlangung des akademischen Grades
Doctor Rerum Politicarum
an der
Fakultat fur Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften
der Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat Heidelberg
vorgelegt von
Adam Dominiak
Heidelberg, November 2010Acknowledgments
This dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance, encouragement
and support of many people. First of all, I am deeply indebted to my advisor, Jurgen
Eichberger, who introduced me to the exciting world of decision making under ambi-
guity. He has guided me throughout the whole duration of my thesis. He gave me the
freedom to develop my own ideas, encouraged me to search for answers and at the criti-
cal junctures, provided me the moral support without which I would not have been able
to successfully nish this project. His in uence on my development as researcher will
remain substantial. I am also very grateful to J org Oechssler who kindly agreed to act
as a second adviser. His helpful advice and valuable comments signi cantly deepened
my understanding of experimental methodology.
I am also indebted to my colleagues Peter Dursch, Jean-Philippe Lefort and Wen-
delin Schnedler, who co-authored papers on which this thesis is based. Working with
them was both an enjoyable and valuable experience for me. Without them this thesis
would not exist, at least not in this form.
The Alfred-Weber Institute of the University of Heidelberg provided, through their
weekly seminars and invited guests, the unique possibility of communicating directly
with internationally renowned scientists. In particular, I bene ted a lot from the
comments and suggestions of Ani Guerdijkova, Hans Haller, David Kelsey and David
Schmeidler. I would also like to thank Phillipe Mongin, Simon Grant and Jacob Sagi
for the illuminating discussions during their visits to the University of Heidelberg.
The Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at the University of Heidelberg, as
well as the Sonderforschungsbereich of the University of Mannheim provided nancial
support which allowed me to participate in many international conferences. This gave
me the opportunity to meet Soo Hong Chew, Michele Cohen, Daniel Ellsberg, Eran
Hanany, Yoram Halevy, Mark Machina, Klaus Nehring, Sujoy Mukerji, Arno Riedel,
1Klaus Ritzberger, Tomasz Strzalecki, Peter Wakker and Jan Werner. I would like to
thank all of them for illuminating discussions and for many helpful comments. A special
thanks is extended to Peter Wakker who commented on two chapters of this thesis and
who gave me fascinating recommendations on the relevant literature.
Thanks are also due to the participants of the Spring Meeting of Young Economists
in Lille 2009 and the International Economic Meeting which took place in Warsaw 2008
and 2009. I am also grateful to the participants of the 5th Asia Paci c Meeting of
the Economic Science Association in Haifa 2009, the 2nd Behavioral and Experimental
Economics Symposium in Maastricht 2009. Participation at the Workshop on New
Risks and Loss Aversion in honor of Daniel Kahnemann hosted by the University of
Rotterdam 2009, the Workshop on Risk, Ambiguity, and Decisions in honor of Daniel
Ellsberg hosted by the University of Vienna 2010, the 14th FUR conference in New
Castle and the RUD conference in Paris 2010 allowed me to present and discuss my
research results.
I would like to thank all my colleagues at the University of Heidelberg, especially
Ute Schumacher and Gabi Rauscher, for the nice working atmosphere during these four
years.
Last but not least, I would also like to thank my family. They have supported and
encouraged me from the start with their best wishes.
2Contents
1 Introduction 6
2 Bayesian Decision Theory 12
2.1 Historical Backgrounds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
2.2 Subjective Expected Utility Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17
2.3 Dynamic Decision Problems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22
3 Non-Bayesian Decision Theory 27
3.1 Ellsberg’s Experiments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27
3.2 Ambiguity Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33
3.3 Ambiguity Attitudes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38
4 Ambiguity and Randomization Attitudes 45
4.1 Experimental Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.1.1 Random Devices and Tickets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
4.1.2 Eliciting Ticket Values . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
4.2 Ambiguity and Randomization Attitude . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
4.2.1 Empirical De nitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49
4.2.2 Predictions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51
4.3 Implementation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53
4.4 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
4.4.1 Main ndings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55
4.4.2 Robustness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57
34.4.3 Other Findings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 58
4.5 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
4.6 Proof . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
5 Dynamic Ellsberg Urn Experiment 65
5.1 Dynamic 3-color experiment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
5.2 Experimental Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
5.3 Results . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72
5.4 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
6 Dynamic Choquet Preferences and Unambiguous Events 79
6.1 Choquet Expected Utility Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
6.1.1 Static Choquet Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81
6.1.2 Unambiguous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
6.1.3 Updating Choquet Preferences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 86
6.2 Dynamic Characterization of Unambiguous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6.2.1 N-Unambiguous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
6.2.2 Z-Unambiguous Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
6.3 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94
6.4 Proofs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
7 \Agreeing to Disagree" Type Results Under Ambiguity 107
7.1 Preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
7.1.1 Knowledge Structure . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
7.1.2 Interpersonal Decision Model . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
7.2 Agreement Theorems under Ambiguity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
7.2.1 Su cient Condition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
7.2.2 Agreement Theorem - The Converse Result . . . . . . . . . . . 116
7.3 Speculative Trade under Ambiguity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
7.4 Proofs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
48 Conclusion 132
Appendix 134
A Ambiguity and Randomization Attitudes 134
A.1 Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134
A.2 Valuation Screen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137
A.3 Variable De nitions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138
A.4 Selection on Observables: Hypothesis 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
A.5 Selection on Observables: Hypothesis 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140
B Ambiguity and Dynamic Choice 141
B.1 Instructions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
B.2 Decision Sheet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143
B.3 Questionnaire 1 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144
B.4 2 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 146
B.5 Multinomial Logistic Regression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
References 147
5Chapter 1
Introduction
Theories of decision making play a fundamental role in economic theory. Most econom-
ically relevant decisions have to be made in the presence of uncertainty. Uncertainty
pertains to situations in which an agent, called a decision maker, faces the problem
of choosing a course of action. The choice of a course of action, by itself, does not
determine a unique outcome. The decision maker knows which circumstances a ect the
outcomes of her actions, but she is incapable of saying which of them she will obtain
with certainty. The standard practice in economics when modeling decision making un-
der uncertainty is to follow the Bayesian approach. In this approach it is assumed that
the decision maker’s subjective beliefs are quanti able by a unique probability distribu-
tion and that these probabilistic beliefs are used in decision making, typically as a basis
for expected utility maximization. Moreover, the arrival of new information a ects the
decision maker’s beliefs, and posterior beliefs are obtained by updating the prior ones
in accordance with Bayes’ rule. The subjective expected utility theory of Savage (1954)
is rmly established