Abstract
We show that if decision makers may have stakes in certain events then the experimental elicitation of their subjective probabilities of these events is impossible.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Anscombe, F.J. and Aumann, R.J.: 1963, A definition of subjective probability,Annals of Mathematical Statistics,34, 199–205.
de Finetti, B.: 1974,Theory of Probability, Vol. 1, New York: Wiley.
Green, J.R., Lau, L.J., and Polemarchakis, H.M.: 1978, A theory on the identification of the von Neumann-Morgenstern utility function from asset demands,Economic Letters,1, 217–220.
Holt, C.A. Jr.: 1986, Scoring-rule procedures for eliciting subjective probability and utility functions, inBayesian Inference and Decision Techniques, P. Goel and A. Zellner (Eds.) Elsevier, New York.
Kadane, J.B. and Winkler, R.L.: 1988, Separating probability elicitation from utilities,Journal of American Statistical Association,83, 357–363.
Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A.: 1979, Prospect theory: an analysis of decision under risk,Econometrica,47, 263–291.
Karni, E. and Schmeidler, D.: 1992, On the uniqueness of subjective probabilities, Forthcoming inEconomic Theory.
Nau, R.: 1991, Coherent decision analysis with inseparable probabilities and utilities, Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, working paper No. 9101.
Savage, L.J.: 1954,The Foundations of Statistics, New York: Wiley.
Savage, L.J.: 1971, Elicitation of personal probabilities and expectations,Journal of American Statistical Association,66, 783–801.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
We thank Eyal Sulganik for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Karni, E., Safra, Z. The impossibility of experimental elicitation of subjective probabilities. Theor Decis 38, 313–320 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01362238
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01362238