Decisions with conflicting and imprecise information

When facing situations involving uncertainty, experts might provide imprecise and conflicting opinions. Recent experiments have shown that decision makers display aversion towards both disagreement among experts and imprecision of information. We provide an axiomatic foundation for a decision criterion that allows one to distinguish on a behavioral basis the decision maker’s attitude towards imprecision and disagreement. This criterion accommodates patterns of preferences observed in experiments that are precluded by two-steps procedures, where information is first aggregated, and then used by the decision maker. This might be seen as an argument for having experts transmitting a more detailed information to the decision maker. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2013