We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
THE SLANTING OF SUBJECTIVE PROBABILITIES--AGREEMENT ON SOME ESSENTIALS.
- Authors
Brewer, K.R.W.; Fellner, William
- Abstract
This article presents comments on a symposium published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics entitled Decisions Under Certainty. The publication of the symposium has given rise to a considerable amount of discussion on the subject both in print and private correspondence. One of the principal issues thus aired has been the rationality of a procedure described as the slanting of subjective probabilities. It was generally agreed by all contributors that such slanting occurred in practice, but while author William Fellner regarded the phenomenon as rational and defensible, another symposium contributor, Howard Raiffa, attacked it as not in accordance with the Savage axioms and showed that in particular cases, the use of slanting must result in an opportunity loss, and therefore must, by definition, be irrational. K. R. W. Brewer suggested in his Comment that the rationality of slanting depended critically on whether the subject had a free choice between betting on a particular event and betting on its complement. He argued that where free choice existed, slanting was irrational but that where there was a requirement on the subject to bet on a particular event chosen by the experimenter, slanting could be viewed as a perfectly rational hedge against being tricked.
- Subjects
ECONOMICS; PROBABILITY theory; DECISION making; AXIOMS; SOCIAL sciences
- Publication
Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1965, Vol 79, Issue 4, p657
- ISSN
0033-5533
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/1880658