A wise decider D uses the contents of his mind fully, accurately and efficiently. D's ideal decisions, i.e., those that best serve his interests, would be embedded in a comprehensive set of totally coherent judgments lodged in his mind. They would conform to the norms of statistical decision...

This paper shows how revealed preference relations, observed under general budget sets, can be extended using closure operators which impose certain assumptions on preferences. Common extensions are based on the assumption that preferences are convex and/or monotonic, but we also consider...

Savage's axioms show the rationality of maximizing expected utility when all uncertainties are explicitly modelled. But individuals actually make decisions in bounded contexts called small worlds. Savage's axioms do not imply the optimality of maximizing expected utility in small worlds unless...

The mean-variance approach is an influential theory of decision under risk proposed by Markowitz (Markowitz, H. 1952. Portfolio selection. J. Finance 7(1) 77-91). The mean-variance approach implies violations of first-order stochastic dominance not commonly observed in the data. This paper...

Empirical research often requires a method how to convert a deterministic economic theory into an econometric model. A popular method is to add a random error term on the utility scale. This method, however, violates stochastic dominance. A modification of this method is proposed to avoid...

This paper aims to analyze the impact of applying for an advance tax ruling and of examining complex tax issues with the help of an external consultant, on the investor's decision to invest when the environment is uncertain. Using decision theory, we first determine the maximum fee an investor...

The classical or frequentist approach to statistics (in which inference is centered on significance testing), is associated with a philosophy in which science is deductive and follows Popperis doctrine of falsification. In contrast, Bayesian inference is commonly associated with inductive...