The expected utility model developed by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern dominated decision theory from its formulation in 1944 until the late 1970s, not only as a prescriptive, but also as a descriptive model, despite powerful criticism from Maurice Allais and Daniel Ellsberg who showed that, in certain choice problems, decisions were usually inconsistent with the axioms of expected utility theory. These problems are usually referred to as the Allais paradox and Ellsberg paradox.
Beginning in 1979 with the publication of the prospect theory of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, a range of generalized expected utility models were developed with the aim of resolving the Allais and Ellsberg paradoxes, while maintaining many of the attractive properties of expected utility theory.
Important examples were anticipated utility theory, later referred to as rank-dependent utility theory, weighted utility (Chew 1982), and expected uncertain utility theory. A general representation, using the concept of the local utility function was presented by Mark J. Machina. Since then, generalizations of expected utility theory have proliferated, but the probably most frequently used model is nowadays cumulative prospect theory, a further development of prospect theory, introduced in 1992 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky.
Given its motivations and approach, generalized expected utility theory may properly be regarded as a subfield of behavioral economics, but it is more frequently located within mainstream economic theory.
Famous quotes containing the words generalized, expected and/or utility:
“One is conscious of no brave and noble earnestness in it, of no generalized passion for intellectual and spiritual adventure, of no organized determination to think things out. What is there is a highly self-conscious and insipid correctness, a bloodless respectability submergence of matter in manner—in brief, what is there is the feeble, uninspiring quality of German painting and English music.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“What is a country without rabbits and partridges? They are among the most simple and indigenous animal products; ancient and venerable families known to antiquity as to modern times; of the very hue and substance of Nature, nearest allied to leaves and to the ground,—and to one another; it is either winged or it is legged. It is hardly as if you had seen a wild creature when a rabbit or a partridge bursts away, only a natural one, as much to be expected as rustling leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Moral sensibilities are nowadays at such cross-purposes that to one man a morality is proved by its utility, while to another its utility refutes it.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)