We consider conditions under which the representation of the world available to a boundedly rational decision-maker, whose awareness in- creases over time, constitutes an adequate `small world' (in the sense of Savage 1954) for the assessment of a given decision. Equivalently, we consider...

This paper describes experiences in the development and testing of three distinct financial models to support farm forestry decisions involving non-traditional tree species in northern Australia and in the Philippines. A variety of options were examined with respect to model design, yield...

We formulate a dynamic framework for an individual decision-maker within which discovery of previously unconsidered propositions is possible. Using a standard game-theoretic representation of the state space as a tree structure generated by the actions of agents (including acts of nature), we...

We present a definition of increasing uncertainty, in which an elementary increase in the uncertainty of any act corresponds to the addition of an `elementary bet' that increases consumption by a fixed amount in (relatively) `good' states and decreases consumption by a fixed (and possibly...

We develop a model of games with awareness that allows for differential levels of awareness. We show that, for the standard modal logical interpretations of belief and awareness, a player cannot believe there exist propositions of which he is unaware. Nevertheless, we argue that a boundedly...

We give a formal treatment of optimal risk sharing contracts in the face of ambiguity. The central idea is that boundedly rational individuals do not have access to a language sufficiently rich to describe all possible states of nature. The ambiguity in a contract arises from contractual clauses...

The Precautionary Principle has been proposed as a basis for making decisions about environmental issues but remains controversial. Using a model of inductively justified propositions about awareness, this paper shows how the Precautionary Principle may be interpreted as a heuristic guide for...

Savage motivated his Sure-Thing Principle b y arguing that, whenever an act would be preferred if an event obtains and preferred if an event did not obtain, then it should be preferred overall. The idea that it should be possible to decompose and recompose decision problems in this way has...

We provide an axiomatization of an additively separable social welfare function in the context of Harsanyi’s impartial observer theorem. To do this, we reformulate Harsanyi’s setting to make the lotteries over the identities the observer may assume independent of the social alternative....