Does anyone know how much people are typically willing to pay to switch options in the Ellsberg paradox? Among those that would pay to switch, my expectation is around 10%, not the ~50% predicted by max-min. This sort of mild ambiguity aversion is probably better captured by prospect theory.
This is a very general point. Most of the uncertainty people face is of the sort that they would naively classify as Knighian, so if people actually behaved according to MMEU, then they would essentially be playing minimax against the world.
Yeah that could lead to some pretty dumb behavior. For a silly example, “I don’t know the skill of other drivers, so I’ll just never use a road, because never using a road has higher minimum utility than dying in a car crash.”
MMEU fails as a decision theory that we actually want for the same reason that laypeople’s intuitions about AI fail- it’s rare to have a proper understanding of how powerful the phrases “maximum” and “minimum” are.
As a quick example, actually following MMEU means that a vacuum metastability event is the best thing that could possibly happen to the universe, because it removes the possibility of humanity being tortured for eternity. Add in the fact that it doesn’t allow you to deal with infinitesimals correctly (e.g. Pascal’s Wager should never fail to convince an MMEU agent), and I’m seriously confused as to the usefulness of this.
Does anyone know how much people are typically willing to pay to switch options in the Ellsberg paradox? Among those that would pay to switch, my expectation is around 10%, not the ~50% predicted by max-min. This sort of mild ambiguity aversion is probably better captured by prospect theory.
This is a very general point. Most of the uncertainty people face is of the sort that they would naively classify as Knighian, so if people actually behaved according to MMEU, then they would essentially be playing minimax against the world.
Yeah that could lead to some pretty dumb behavior. For a silly example, “I don’t know the skill of other drivers, so I’ll just never use a road, because never using a road has higher minimum utility than dying in a car crash.”
MMEU fails as a decision theory that we actually want for the same reason that laypeople’s intuitions about AI fail- it’s rare to have a proper understanding of how powerful the phrases “maximum” and “minimum” are. As a quick example, actually following MMEU means that a vacuum metastability event is the best thing that could possibly happen to the universe, because it removes the possibility of humanity being tortured for eternity. Add in the fact that it doesn’t allow you to deal with infinitesimals correctly (e.g. Pascal’s Wager should never fail to convince an MMEU agent), and I’m seriously confused as to the usefulness of this.