HPPE Seminar 4 December - "Valuing What Could Have Been"

Dear all,

Next Wednesday, on December 4th , Orri Stefansson will be presenting at the HPPE seminar on the topic "Valuing What Could Have Been".
The seminar takes place in Clement House 2.04 at 1 p.m. at the London School of Economics. Everyone is welcome.

Abstract:
The value of actual outcomes or states of affairs often depends on what could have been. To take a simply example, becoming unemployed may seem even worse if it is true that you previously could have chosen but turned down a job that guaranteed long-term job security. Dependencies of this kind between counterfactual and actual outcomes create well-known “paradoxes” for orthodox decision theory and economics. The best known of these paradoxes is perhaps the so-called Allais Paradox, but considerations of fair distributions of chances give rise to similar paradoxes. In this paper we show how to avoid these paradoxes by extending the
domain of Richard Jeffrey’s desirability function to counterfactual prospects. Based on Richard Bradley’s recent Multidimensional Possible World Semantics for Conditionals, we define Jeffrey-desirability functions over sets of n-tuples of worlds. This makes it possible to express desirabilistic dependencies between actual and counterfactual outcomes, and allows us to represent as maximising desirability preferences of agents who care about what could have been. In particular, unlike orthodox decision theory, the extended Jeffrey framework can represent the intuitively rational preference that generates the Allais paradox as maximising an expected value.

Orri Stefansson is a PhD student in philosophy at London School of Economics and Political Science, working mainly on the foundations of decision theory and philosophical issues surrounding counterfactuals.

More information about the seminar is available at : http://www.lse.ac.uk/economicHistory/seminars/HPPE/HPPEMT2013.aspx or by contacting Gerardo Serra ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) or Raphaelle Schwarzberg ([log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>).

Best wishes,
Gerardo Serra and Raphaelle Schwarzberg


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