Cautiousness when experts disagree

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Bommier, Antoine; Fabre, Adrien; Goussebaile, Arnaud; Heyen, Daniel
• 署名单位: Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich; Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS); Universite Paris Saclay; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; AgroParisTech; Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees; Universite Paris Saclay; AgroParisTech; Institut Polytechnique de Paris; Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussees; RPTU University Kaiserslautern
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC THEORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0531
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jet.2026.106181
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: expected utility; decision-making; risk-aversion; ambiguity; uncertainty; aggregation; opinion; imprecise; beliefs; MODEL

摘要

Experts often disagree. A decision-maker may want to be cautious and prefer alternatives that have expert consensus over those that do not. Existing models of decision making under expert disagreement rest on ambiguity-averse preferences adopting a unanimity principle: If all experts consider one choice better than another, so should the decision-maker. Such unanimity among experts, however, can be spurious, masking substantial disagreement on the underlying reasons. We introduce a novel notion of cautiousness to distinguish spurious from genuine unanimity and develop a model that can capture cautiousness in our sense. The central element of our model is the cautious aggregation of experts' beliefs.