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Savage's Omelet

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2022

Richard Jeffrey
Richard Jeffrey*
Affiliation:
Princeton University
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Extract

Consider an example. Your wife has just broken five good eggs into a bowl when you come in and volunteer to finish making the omelet. A sixth egg, which for some reason must either be used for the omelet or wasted altogether, lies unbroken beside the bowl. You must decide what to do with this unbroken egg. Perhaps it is not too great an oversimplification to say that you must decide among three acts only, namely, to break it into the bowl containing the other five, to break it into a saucer for inspection, or to throw it away without inspection ([15], p. 13).

The foregoing is the only example that L. J. Savage uses in the book that made Bayesian decision theory respectable. In discussing this example, Savage made a very interesting claim, that I want to explore here. The exploration will be far from complete.

Type
Part VII. Recent Developments in Rational Decision Theory
Information
PSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association , Volume 1976 , Issue 2: Volume Two: Symposia and Invited Papers 1976 , 1976 , pp. 361 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © 1977 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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References

[1] Balch, M. and Fishburn, P. “Subjective Expected Utility for Conditional Primitives.” In Essays on Economic Behavior Under Uncertainty (Contributions to Economic Analysis 88). Edited by Balch, M., McFadden, D.L., and Wu, S.Y.. New York: American Elsevier, 1974. Pages 57–69.Google Scholar
[2] Gibbard, Allan and Harper, William L.. “Counterfactuals and Two Kinds of Expected Utility”. Discussion Paper No. 194, Departments of Philosophy, University of Pittsburgh and University of Western Ontario, 1976.Google Scholar
[3] Krantz, David H., R., Duncan Luce, Suppes, Patrick and Tversky, Amos. Foundations of Measurement, Volume 1. New York: Academic Press, 1971.Google Scholar
[4] Lewis, David. “Probabilities of conditionals and conditional probabilities.” Philosophical Review 85(1976): 297–315.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
[5] Savage, L. J. The Foundations of Statistics. New York: Wiley, 1954.Google Scholar