A Model of Procedural Decision Making in the Presence of Risk

We introduce a procedural model of risky choice in which an individual is endowed with a core preference relation that may be highly incomplete. She can, however, derive further rankings of alternatives from her core preferences by means of a procedure based on the independence axiom. We find that the preferences that are generated from an initial set of rankings according to this procedure can be represented by means of a "set" of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions, thereby allowing for incompleteness of preference relations. The proposed theory also yields new characterizations of the stochastic dominance orderings. Copyright 2002 by the Economics Department of the University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association