Conferences at Department of Economics, University of Toronto, Canadian Economic Theory Conference 2014

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Preferences for Information and Ambiguity

Jian Li*

Last modified: 2014-04-05

Abstract


p, li { white-space: pre-wrap; } This paper studies intrinsic preferences for how information is revealed. We
enrich the standard dynamic choice model in two dimensions. First, we introduce
a novel choice domain that allows preferences to depend on how information is
revealed. Second, conditional on a given information partition, we allow prefer-
ences over state-contingent outcomes to depart from expected utility axioms. In
particular, we accommodate ambiguity sensitive preferences. We establish that a
dynamically consistent decision maker (DM) is averse to partial information if and
only if her static preferences satisfy a property called Event Complementarity. We
show that Event Complementarity is closely related to ambiguity aversion in popular
families of ambiguity preferences.

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