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Risk, rationality and expected utility theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Richard Pettigrew
Richard Pettigrew*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
*
Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

There are decision problems where the preferences that seem rational to many people cannot be accommodated within orthodox decision theory in the natural way. In response, a number of alternatives to the orthodoxy have been proposed. In this paper, I offer an argument against those alternatives and in favour of the orthodoxy. I focus on preferences that seem to encode sensitivity to risk. And I focus on the alternative to the orthodoxy proposed by Lara Buchak’s risk-weighted expected utility theory. I will show that the orthodoxy can be made to accommodate all of the preferences that Buchak’s theory can accommodate.

Keywords

Riskdecision theoryexpected utility theoryrational choice theoryaccuracyscoring rules
Type
Articles
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 45 , Issue 5-6: Special Issue: Belief, Action, and Rationality over Time , December 2015 , pp. 798 - 826
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Journal of Philosophy 2015

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