Expected Utility Maximization and Attractiveness Maximization

Abstract

When a decision-maker needs to choose among a number of choices, each having a certain probability to happen, one of the traditional ways discussed in economics is to calculate the expected utility of each choice and chooses the choice with the maximum expected utility. However, most of the humans do not do so in real situations. One of the famous example is the Allais paradox. The reason why most of the people do not maximize the expected utility is that people have different attitudes towards risk in different situations and people are generally risk-averse. In this paper, we proposed a model of decision-making, which considers the risk attitude of a player, reputations of other players and the payoffs of the choices. We call this model attractiveness maximization. We find that the model of attractiveness maximization can be used to explain a situation, the Allais paradox, which violates the expected utility theory.