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Coalescing, Event Commutativity, and Theories of Utility

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Abstract

Preferences satisfying rank-dependent utility exhibit three necessary properties: coalescing (forming the union of events having the same consequence), status-quo event commutativity, and rank-dependent additivity. The major result is that, under a few additional, relatively non-controversial, necessary conditions on binary gambles and assuming mappings are onto intervals, the converse is true. A number of other utility representations are checked for each of these three properties (see Table 2, Section 7).

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  1. University of California, Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA, 92697-5100

    R. Luce

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Luce, R. Coalescing, Event Commutativity, and Theories of Utility. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 16, 87–114 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1007762425252

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