Pragmatic approach to decision making under uncertainty: The case of the disjunction effect
Authors:
Maria Bagassi a;
Laura Macchi - We are very grateful to Giuseppe Mosconi and Peter Ayton for their comments on a previous draft of this paper.a
| Affiliation: | a Universit degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy |
DOI:
10.1080/13546780500375663
Publication Frequency:
4 issues per year
Formats available:
HTML
(English)
:
PDF
(English)
View Article:
View Article (PDF)
View Article (HTML)
Abstract
The disjunction effect (Tversky & Shafir, 1992) occurs when decision makers prefer option x (versus y) when knowing that event A occurs and also when knowing that event A does not occur, but they refuse x (or prefer y) when not knowing whether or not A occurs. This form of incoherence violates Savage's (1954) sure-thing principle, one of the basic axioms of the rational theory of decision making. The phenomenon was attributed to a lack of clear reasons for accepting an option (x) when subjects are under uncertainty. Through a pragmatic analysis of the task and a consequent reformulation of it, we show that the effect does not depend on the presence of uncertainty, but on the introduction of non-relevant goals into the text problem, in both the well-known Gamble problem and the Hawaii problem.
|
| view references (23) |

Download Citation


degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy
CiteULike
Del.icio.us
BibSonomy
Connotea