Information and capacities

Abstract

Most economists consider that the cases of negative information value that non-Bayesian decision makers seem to exhibit, clearly show that these models are not models representing rational behavior. We consider this issue for Choquet Expected Utility maximizers in a simple framework, that is the problem of choosing on which event to bet. First, we find a necessary condition to prevent negative information value that we call Separative Monotonicity. This is a weaker condition than Savage Sure thing Principle and it appears that necessity and possibility measures satisfy it and that we can find conditioning rules such that the information value is always positive. In a second part, we question the way information value is usually measured and suggest that negative information values are merely resulting from an inadequate formula. Yet, we suggest to impose what appears as a weaker requirement, that is, the betting strategy should not be Statistically Dominated. We show for classical updating rules applied to belief functions that this requirement is violated. We consider a class of conditioning rules and exhibit a necessary and sufficient condition in order to satisfy the Statistical Dominance criterion in the case of belief functions.