This article had an interesting title so I scanned it—but it lacked an abstract, a
conclusion, had lots of maths in it—and I haven’t liked most of Stuart’s other articles—so I gave up on it early.
The article attempts to show that you don’t need the independence axiom to justify using expected utility. So I replaced the independence axiom with another axiom that basically says that very thin distribution is pretty much the same as a guaranteed return.
Then I showed that if you had a lot of “reasonable” lotteries and put them together, you should behave approximately according to expected utility.
There’s a lot of maths in it because the result is novel, and therefore has to be firmly justified. I hope to explore non-independent lotteries in future posts, so the foundations need to be solid.
This article had an interesting title so I scanned it—but it lacked an abstract, a conclusion, had lots of maths in it—and I haven’t liked most of Stuart’s other articles—so I gave up on it early.
The article attempts to show that you don’t need the independence axiom to justify using expected utility. So I replaced the independence axiom with another axiom that basically says that very thin distribution is pretty much the same as a guaranteed return.
Then I showed that if you had a lot of “reasonable” lotteries and put them together, you should behave approximately according to expected utility.
There’s a lot of maths in it because the result is novel, and therefore has to be firmly justified. I hope to explore non-independent lotteries in future posts, so the foundations need to be solid.