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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Expected-utility maximization is not the best general model of human decision-making behavior

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Interpreting behavior as expected-utility maximizing requires undue case-specific restrictions to fit the data
      ?

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    • 2.Alternative decision theories (cumulative prospect theory, alpha-nu utility theory, rank-dependent utility theory) yield better predictions with fewer restrictions
      ?

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    • 3.Empirical evidence identifies Prelec's (1998) specification as the statistically most common human utility function, which is not standard expected utility
      ?

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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Allais (1953) showed that rational agents systematically violate the independence axiom of expected utility under controlled experimental conditions.
      ?

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    • 2.Since the independence axiom is constitutive of EU theory, Allais-pattern violations are not modeling errors but evidence of a fundamentally different decision architecture.
      ?

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    • 3.Savage's own admission that he initially fell prey to the Allais paradox undermines the claim that EU violations reduce merely to computational or informational failures.
      ?

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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Kahneman and Tversky's prospect theory demonstrates that humans systematically weight losses more heavily than equivalent gains, violating EU axioms.
      ?

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    • 2.This loss aversion is not a bias to be corrected but a stable, cross-cultural feature of human valuation that EU cannot accommodate structurally.
      ?

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