In light of the interest in axiomatic models of decision making in recent years, one is led to ask, in what ways do axiomatic derivations advance positive economics? If economists are interested in predicting how people behave, without a pretense to change individual decision making, how can...

We discuss the notion of a state of the world in axiomatic decision theory, and argue that it should be viewed as an "eventuality" that is implicitly assumed to be independent of the process by which prefer- ences are observed. The distinction between states, which are assumed to resolve all...

We offer a model that combines and generalizes case-based decision theory and expected utility maximization. It is based on the premise that an agent looks ahead and assesses possible future scenarios, but may not know how to evaluate their likelihood and may not be sure that the set of...

Consumption decisions are partly influenced by values and ideologies. Consumers care about global warming, child labor, fair trade, etc. Incorporating values into the consumer’s utility function will often violate monotonicity, if consumption hurts values in a way that isn’t offset by...

We argue that a precedent is important not only because it changes the relative frequency of a certain event, making it positive rather than zero, but also because it changes the way that relative frequencies are weighed. Specifically, agents assess probabilities of future events based on past...

We argue that a precedent is important not only because it changes the relative frequency of a certain event, making it positive rather than zero, but also because it changes the way that relative frequencies are weighed. Specifically, agents assess probabilities of future events based on past...

Agents make predictions based on similar past cases, while also learning the relative importance of various attributes in judging similarity. We ask whether the resulting "empirical similarity" is unique, and how easy it is to find it. We show that with many observations and few relevant...

Decision theory offers a formal approach to decision making, which is often viewed and taught as the rational way to approach managerial decisions. Half a century ago it generated high hopes of capturing and perhaps replacing intuition, and providing the “right” answer in practically all...